You know you should leave a new job when....



  • A co-worker who has worked at the company for 4 years tells you matter-of-factly that they don't give raises nor promotions.   Also, when the work feels like boring scut work and is neither interesting, challenging nor professionally desirable.



  • So does this mean you've got things you turned down that you are now going to reapply to or start over completely or what?



  • Start over completely, probably after the new year.  The job now is flexible and has good benefits; that's about it.  It's not really development so I'm going to keep my eye out for real development positions again, since I do kind of miss that part.



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    A co-worker who has worked at the company for 4 years tells you matter-of-factly that they don't give raises nor promotions.
     

    Have you investigated if this is the case company-wide, or just with this individual?

    I would question why someone who's knowingly worked for a company that doesn't give raises or promotions... is still there 4 years later.



  • He could just be a Wally.

    But if you've confirmed it with a couple other people, then yeah, walk.



  • I haven't confirmed it yet; this just came up in passing as we were the only two folks in IT there today (I don't have PTO yet as I'm not past 90 days). Every other than me in the department has been there like 4 years or more (some have been there I think close to 10 years).

    I wouldn't care so much but I'm not doing development of any real kind (just using their proprietary applications that involve some pseudocode-like things. Think the "BobX" story on the main site but it's not a wrapper around another language, it's an application that reads/parses the pseudocode), so it's pretty much looking like without raises and promotions I could kiss my development career goodbye as nobody is going to hire somebody with (let's say this is down the road) 3 years experience working with some in-house language and applications that nobody else in the world uses.



  • @Cassidy said:

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    A co-worker who has worked at the company for 4 years tells you matter-of-factly that they don't give raises nor promotions.
     

    Have you investigated if this is the case company-wide, or just with this individual?

    I would question why someone who's knowingly worked for a company that doesn't give raises or promotions... is still there 4 years later.

    I've learned to ask for enough to keep me happy indefinitely up front. I suppose that if inflation picks up, I might have to revisit the issue; but I've learned that expecting raises is unrealistic. Many places just don't give raises, and few of these places advertise that fact. So I just assume there will be no raises.



  • @bridget99 said:

    I've learned to ask for enough to keep me happy indefinitely up front. I suppose that if inflation picks up, I might have to revisit the issue; but I've learned that expecting raises is unrealistic. Many places just don't give raises, and few of these places advertise that fact. So I just assume there will be no raises.

    Thing is that only works if you aren't staying long, otherwise you are grabbing some huge amount.  Nothing wrong with making those assumptions if you are moving around every couple years, but it doesn't work so well if you have things keeping you in a job for longer periods.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    He could just be a Wally.
     

    Google for "office wally" but came up nil. What's a Wally? I assume it's the stereotype for complacent ambitionless guy?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    He could just be a Wally.

    Google for "office wally" but came up nil. What's a Wally? I assume it's the stereotype for complacent ambitionless guy?

    It was a Dilbert reference. Not terribly far off, but I would add that he goes out of his way to avoid having to do any actual work.



  • @dhromed said:

    What's a Wally? I assume it's the stereotype for complacent ambitionless guy?

    In my youth, I've known the UK to use it as a term interchangable with "an idiot" or "an incompetant", someone quite useless at what they do.

    I always felt it was applied to figureheads that are promoted away from doing any real damage and are tolerated but worked around to deliver results of value - someone who's blisfully incompetant yet remains happily unaware of their worth.

    Different, more degradatory terms (arsehole/wanker/dickhead) are reserved for those who are not only incompetant but create more damage by stubbornly inserting themselves into the productive workflow and either introduce confusion or act as a blocker. "Seagull Management" is a more term I've used nowadays (flies in, shits over everything, flaps out again - leaving others to clean up their mess).



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    He could just be a Wally.
     

    Google for "office wally" but came up nil. What's a Wally? I assume it's the stereotype for complacent ambitionless guy?

     

    In Dilbert, Wally is an engineer that doesn't want to do any work at all, and makes up excuses to get out of doing real work or just appear to be working.  He basically just wants to do the absolute minimum possible and collect a paycheck without ever wanting to do anything.

    I don't know if that's the situation here, but I am more than a bit weirded out that most everyone here has been here for a number of years; we have somebody leaving today and I think they've been here for 15 years or thereabouts.  I could never work more than a year or two in any place that doesn't provide career advancement.

     



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I don't know if that's the situation here, but I am more than a bit weirded out that most everyone here has been here for a number of years; we have somebody leaving today and I think they've been here for 15 years or thereabouts.  I could never work more than a year or two in any place that doesn't provide career advancement.
     

    There can be career advancement and career growth without the trappings of advancement (e.g. new titles).  The idea of career growth as a ladder tends to have the problem that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, then struggle as they fail because they were promoted one time too many to be successful.  I've worked at places with flat organization charts and few titles, and there were still many opportunities to grow and to be recognized for that growth.



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I don't know if that's the situation here, but I am more than a bit weirded out that most everyone here has been here for a number of years; we have somebody leaving today and I think they've been here for 15 years or thereabouts.

    Again, have you investigated reasons behind this? Some organisations (such as local government in UK) work quite statically, are resistant to change and employees prefer the stability of working within a comfort zone. It doesn't mean their pay doesnt increase, but that they could have been performing the same duties for those 15 years, enjoy what they do, are good at it and don't seek promotion or change.

    A flipside is that someone could have worked their way up through the ranks in those 15 years, building upon previous business knowledge they've gained and now are effective managers because they have first-hand knowledge of coal-face activities. Many organisations like to promote from within and reward loyalty - it can often work out cheaper than external hiring.

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I could never work more than a year or two in any place that doesn't provide career advancement.

    I've worked the last ten years doing pretty much the same job (IT Trainer) but the actual content keeps changing regularly and I've been exposed to a wide range of knowledge and skills in different industries. Although my core duties are content delivery, I've also been involved in content creation (product development, change management, improvement programmes) and my expanding knowledge stands me in good stead to offer consultancy (both pre-sales and post-delivery) as well as rudimentary BA when attending client sites.

    I know if I was still regurgitating the same information two/three years down the line I'd get stale pretty quickly. I'm happy with the pace of change, keeping up with current developments in the IT and business world. Others may not, perhaps it's not for them.

    I suppose - in short - you may need to learn a bit more about the culture of your new company and decide if it fits your goals. It's a good sign that you're questioning your new environment but it sounds like you're arriving at conclusions based upon poor quality information.

    Did career progression/advancement get raised as a topic during the interview?  A typical interview question of "where do you see yourself in five years?" gives both parties a clearer picture that long-term goals could be misaligned.



  • It did not (but to be fair at the time I was a little desperate for a job, having lost my prior one due to downsizing 3 months before and running out of options). I have a 90-day review tomorrow with the director, so let's see how that goes. I admit this is secondhand information; I do know there isn't much if any advancement, but there might be lateral moves since it's a somewhat large company (to me, anyways; a few hundred people), so that could be a bonus if I decide to branch into something else; my day job consists of writing what amounts to scripts in an entirely in-house language (all the development is in Delphi, which I do not know and don't desire to learn), so there isn't any longterm career advancement in that regard.



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I have a 90-day review tomorrow with the director, so let's see how that goes.
     

    I'd advise preparing a pile of questions covering topics that should have been thrashed out at the interview, if only to provide clarity for yourself. I suspect you've already mentally created a few, but it helps to have a bulleted list of things to cover - even if it flags up these things were overlooked by this director's HR process.

    A telling point is people in higher positions squirming uncomfortably when presented questions of this type. Any organisation worth its salt will be upfront about what their vision is and how they think they will go about it, preferring to let you go if you don't fit that perpective or deciding how best to utilise you and your skills in their quest.

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I admit this is secondhand information;

    .. but the question still remains why an individual within the organisation holds that POV, and how much truth there is in their words.

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I do know there isn't much if any advancement, but there might be lateral moves since it's a somewhat large company (to me, anyways; a few hundred people), so that could be a bonus if I decide to branch into something else;

    Maybe/could be/possibly - topics to thrash out at the meeting, I guess.

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    my day job consists of writing what amounts to scripts in an entirely in-house language (all the development is in Delphi, which I do not know and don't desire to learn), so there isn't any longterm career advancement in that regard.

    Yeah, I'd give it 2-3 months to get a grip of the language and reach my pinnacle before seeing what other options are available - designing scripts for that language, managing changes, managing projects and/or teams of scripters - see what opportunities I could build on.

    If there's none, I'd be looking at hopping out pretty fast. But that's me.



  • They don't have teams of scripters or anything, it's basically myself and another guy (who is more on the SQL end of things) and that's it besides the DBA and a developer (with another developer, maybe two, external contractors). The language is very very basic. It's almost literally what amounts to pseudocode in an MS Word document, not even VBA but something like:

    {IF FIELD_1 = "VALUE"}{SHOW FIELD_1}{ELSE}Alternate text{END}

    which gets put into the word document, and then the Delphi application reads the .doc file and parses out that code.

    We shall see, I guess. I don't mind the company and the people are very friendly, but I do kind of miss doing actual software development (my problem there was trying to find a decent company and not one stuck 10+ years in the past even on new projects)



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    They don't have teams of scripters or anything, it's basically myself and another guy

    *danger*danger*high voltage*jump ship procedure invoked.....

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    which gets put into the word document, and then the Delphi application reads the .doc file and parses out that code.

    Your script code is contained within a *WORD doc*? Holy shitting Moses in a pink sidecar. What's the procesing overhead to read textual commands from a proprietry format like Word?

    Anyway.. how did the meeting go? Spill!

     



  • Was rescheduled to today. I'm going to play it cool; since I don't have another job lined up it's not like I'm going to be all "Yeah, this work bores me so I don't really want to do it anymore" obviously.

    The markup is put in a word doc (actually an RTF but I edit it in Word), which the Delphi program reads and parses out. It's basically a way for non-programmers to put semi-programming logic into the document, for instance if a particular paragraph needs to be shown or hidden it would be something like (in the Word/RTF):

    [IF CONDITION]This paragraph will be shown[ELSE]This other paragraph will be shown instead[END]

    And that's pretty much what I do all day long; add those kind of statements to RTF documents with MS Word as my "IDE". There's another app that uses some kind of HTML but not HTML with everything pulled in from massive (hundreds of lines) stored procs, but that one gets kinda confusing because of how it's written, you sometimes have to return HTML strings from SQL. I don't work on that one too often, just here and there; I don't like working on that because it has no Beta/Test version, everything is live (we have special areas for ourselves that users don't use to test things) and I don't like digging into huge stored procs.

    When I originally applied I thought it would be more of an analyst; talking to users, finding out what programs they need done, coordinating with programmers, etc. On top of that after taking the job I found out that they actually have a spinoff consulting/services company that we actually work for, not the company itself (although most of the work I do deals with the parent company)



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I'm going to play it cool; since I don't have another job lined up it's not like I'm going to be all "Yeah, this work bores me so I don't really want to do it anymore" obviously.
     

    Yup, obviously. But no reason you can't make noises that you're capable of more than you're doing, you have skills that are currently being under-utilised that could bring greater value to this company, you're looking forward to moving onto the next challenge in the organisation now you've done the initial coding probation period, etc.

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    When I originally applied I thought it would be more of an analyst; talking to users, finding out what programs they need done, coordinating with programmers, etc. On top of that after taking the job I found out that they actually have a spinoff consulting/services company that we actually work for, not the company itself (although most of the work I do deals with the parent company)

    No reason not to bring that part up. Not in the sense that the job ain't what you expected - more in the sense that you have offerable skills that could be better suited  elsewhere within the organisation to greater profitibility and advancement.



  • Well review went alright.  I did mention wanting to do more than just write pseudocode in a Word doc and the manager mentioned something in the near future to cut my teeth on some more analyst type projects.  I also got a telecommute day 1/week and found out I already have almost a week of PTO accrued (to put that into perspective on why that's so good for me, my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.).

    I'm still not sure if I want to pursue a development job again, mostly because I do like how laid back and lax this outfit is.  They don't care about hours (when I go for lunch with my co-workers, we usually take an hour and a half or more), work a straight 9-5 (no tacking on an extra hour for lunch) and in general are very friendly.  The work isn't what I'd enjoy at the moment, but the benefits are going to be hard to beat since most software shops here skimp on PTO, holidays and laugh at the idea of telecommuting.



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.
     

    ...how is that legal?



  • @dhromed said:

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.
     

    ...how is that legal?

     

    No idea, but that's what they did (it might have gone up after 3 years, I don't know.  I was there around 2).  I recall tht they only gave 5 paid holidays so I had to use PTO for the Friday after Thanksgiving because otherwise it would have been docked from my pay.  And they weren't sympathetic with time off either; while I was there my grandfather passed away and my manager told me to take as long as I needed.  With family coming down I took the week off, and the entire period was docked as unpaid because their grievance time off was only for parents and spouses, not other family members.

    A non-tech WTF among a sea of tech WTFs at that place.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @ObiWayneKenobi said:
    my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.

    ...how is that legal?

    What about it should be illegal?



  • @boomzilla said:

    @dhromed said:
    @ObiWayneKenobi said:
    my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.
    ...how is that legal?

    What about it should be illegal?

     

    Lack of sick days/PTO I'd guess, but I live in a state that has very lax laws.  I know I've worked for quite a few companies that had no official sick day/PTO policy, it was basically say when you're sick and it would be decided if it counted as paid or unpaid.  I do know if you're under a certain size (not sure what that size is.  The company in question was about 70 employees) you are not required to offer any PTO at all.



  • At one point, I worked for a company that had no concept of vacation or sick time. It was a small company of fewer than 25 people and you negotiated your own deadlines within reason. Then it was up to you to hit those deadlines. As such you made your own hours, and took off whatever you wanted/needed to. They also kept plenty of booze available and would even stock specific brands for you.

    if you missed deadlines though....



  • @locallunatic said:

    @bridget99 said:

    I've learned to ask for enough to keep me happy indefinitely up front. I suppose that if inflation picks up, I might have to revisit the issue; but I've learned that expecting raises is unrealistic. Many places just don't give raises, and few of these places advertise that fact. So I just assume there will be no raises.

    Thing is that only works if you aren't staying long, otherwise you are grabbing some huge amount.  Nothing wrong with making those assumptions if you are moving around every couple years, but it doesn't work so well if you have things keeping you in a job for longer periods.

    Developer salaries hit a relatively high ceiling after 5-10 years and then stay pretty level thereafter. I've got at least that much experience, so I just ask for that salary up front. If I were 20, and making $45,000 per year, but looking to double that by age 30, then I'd have to either get raises or move around a lot. But I'm closer to 40. My goal isn't income growth, it's 1) staying employed as a senior engineer and 2) training for a post-development career.



    I will say, though, that having to work in some proprietary sort-of-like-programming "end user" tool would probably drive me out the door pretty quickly.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @dhromed said:
    @ObiWayneKenobi said:
    my previous job gave you just FIVE paid days off, ever, and that didn't start until you had been with the firm for a year.
    ...how is that legal?

    What about it should be illegal?

     

    Now, note that I'm from a country where you somehow get a mandatory extra paycheck to cover your holiday spending. To me, that seems a little weird on the face of it, but hey, free money. I'm not complaining.

    Still, a crummy five days PTO and only after a year of employment is more toward the company tyrant scale of things. I Hate My Employees And It's Bad Enough That I Have To Pay Them, in a sense. I'm sure your perspective is that we totally coddle employees and throw free time and money at them (we still do just as well as any other country, so apparently it doesn't negatively affect productivity. The picture is more complex though, with different things and services priced at different levels so we can't really directly compare salaries and immediately pass judgement one way or another.)

    (also, I find that while I'm a total leftie/centrist non-cummunist hippie mechanistic progressive, I am not immune to the Green Monster known as money. When they introduced emeralds in Minecraft, I was like FUCK HOW CAN WE MINE THE SHIT OUT OF THOSE ARGRJHLBL MOAR. Games teach me about myself and I grow stronger as a person!)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    Still, a crummy five days PTO and only after a year of employment is more toward the company tyrant scale of things. I Hate My Employees And It's Bad Enough That I Have To Pay Them, in a sense. I'm sure your perspective is that we totally coddle employees and throw free time and money at them (we still do just as well as any other country, so apparently it doesn't negatively affect productivity.

    I think 5 days is pretty crappy. Of course, there are many things to consider. Hourly or salaried? If hourly, you might work some OT to take the place of unpaid days off. My recollection of ObiWayneKenobi's previous situation is that his boss just sucked.

    I'm just saying that a law requiring lots of PTO is going to cause harm. Many firms will give PTO without a law. Some cannot afford it, and so will avoid hiring or go out of business, etc. See for instance, what's happening now in the US with Obamacare: companies are avoiding hiring, moving employees to part time, reducing hours, firing workers. You may have the opinion that it's all worth it, but please don't ignore all of the other consequences.

    @dhromed said:
    also, I find that while I'm a total leftie/centrist non-cummunist hippie mechanistic progressive, I am not immune to the Green Monster known as money.

    Of course, not. You're human. But that does explain why you'd call money "the Green Monster."



  • @boomzilla said:

    But that does explain why you'd call money "the Green Monster."

    It's a really handy monster because it fits in my pocket much better than goats and chickens and this is helpful when I hit the market for some good old-fashioned economy stimulation.

     

     



  • Yeah, the old company was just bad. They were stuck in a sales mentality (most of the floor were sales guys) so never bothered to update their benefits package to account for non-sales people. No flexible hours, no telecommute (not unexpected, but still annoying in this day and age), 5 holiday/PTO/sick days after a year, day after Thanksgiving not being a paid holiday (not a big deal but most places do this so it was weird), just total cluelessness about things. As you may recall I was fired because I was trying to improve how things were done so we didn't have software that crashed 5+ times a day, and didn't have to worry what we broke this time every time we deployed code.

    The new job the really only major minus (and it is a MAJOR one) is the lack of anything that will benefit me in a longterm career unless, I suppose, I want to move into some kind of legal work (I do not). The benefits and flex time and 1/week telecommute are all major plusses (and things I can point out in other interviews), but I don't think they outweigh the boring tedium of having to code in in-house proprietary "end user friendly" kiddie scripts or muck around in huge stored procs because most everything is in the database, especially since I'm getting the development itch again (this was the first job I found after leaving the old company, so I didn't really have a choice as I was almost a month away from being homeless since unemployment barely covered anything at all) and I can't scratch that itch at this place. If I could move entirely away from the pseudocoding and doing analyst stuff then perhaps, but I don't think that will ever fully happen because I'm now the "expert" on that tool (as i said there's just one other guy who does it, along with SQL for the various other tools so he has more on his plate than me; we also have a DBA and a Delphi guy, and an offshore Delphi guy in France I think, and then a project manager type who may or may not be a developer that is in the office once every two weeks for meetings, and two full BA types that I thought I was going to be working with when I interviewed instead of the "app dev" group).

    Also I love how this software makes me use HTML tags in Chrome, but returns in Firefox work fine.



  • @ObiWayneKenobi said:

    I don't think they outweigh the boring tedium
     

    No stack of benefits can outweigh bullshit work.




  • @dhromed said:

    It's a really handy monster because it fits in my pocket much better than goats and chickens and this is helpful when I hit the market for some good old-fashioned economy stimulation.

    Goats make much better monsters, man.



  •  With the 8 eyes and stuff.


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