Hey, it's your friendly resident bug farmer again, with a conundrum. Anyone who can give me workplace/career advice here is much appreciated.
TLDR
I figured out a way to run my department way better than my boss. I've started to make some improvements without telling him what they are. Bumped our productivity up, out of a rut, to several times more than it had ever been. Now I want to prove to management what I've done, but my boss will probably try to take credit for it. I'm going to have to fight my boss to simultaneously prove that he's been ruining the department and I'm the one currently bringing it back up. Dunno what order to do things in, or what all I should ask for in negotiations. Also, mealworm futures are going to be 2022's top-performing financial asset; buy mealworm futures.
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When I made my first post, one of the questions I was asked was "are the Bugs having a Good Time". At first, I had every inclination to think that at my company, we were making sure that all of our bugs had all of their needs taken care of throughout their development. More recently I found out this was wrong, at least for some of our bugs. A lot of our mealworms are not given enough moist feed around the time that they metamorphose. As a result, when they emerge as beetles, they cannot get moisture anywhere, and they turn to eating any eggs that have been laid, and even developing pupae. Sometimes we get okay survival rates from pupa to beetle, other times it's like a little insect Donner Party times ten thousand. Not good. Lots of unnecessary death and whatever kind of strife bugs experience.
Now, it seems like no one at all in the company knows exactly how much of anything is required for any process. Dry feed? "Just give it roughly two of these crude scoops". Beetles/larvae? "Fill the cup about half full". Root slices (moist feed)? "Grab a handful". The instructions we're given are always "just throw some on there". No measurements, at best only approximations. Kinda like one of those "Intro to ____ Science" classes where you learn the conceptual side of things but nothing about how to quantify what you're doing or make predictions.
At one point several months ago, my supervisor decided he wasn't pleased with the job that I had been doing, consisting of separating larvae from pupae with a screen, collecting any beetles out of the skimmed pupae, and then sorting larvae and pupae and beetles into separate trays so that all our trays are maturing together. Boss said to just let everything go through all the stages, and just pull it when it gets to beetles. But ever since about that time, sales from our mealworm operation have been going down. Like, nosediving. For every $100 of product we used to make, we're now making $20 or less- and all of that $20 is from regularly buying mealworms wholesale from other companies and shipping them in. Needless to say, the department has been operating at a loss for over four months. My boss has been periodically blaming me for the downturn, saying that I just need to "do things his way" and it'll all get better.
So what do I do from there? I started experimenting to try to find out how much the organisms really need to thrive. We'd been giving each trays of beetles (where eggs are laid and new larvae hatch), say, N grams of a mix of our feed ingredients on average; I started giving each tray 2N grams, and when I noticed that still wasn't enough, 3N grams. Did I start with just a few, so that I'd be the only one to notice the effect? NO. My dumbass wanted to SAVE THE WORMS. I thought "I'll go ahead and feed all my assigned racks like this, a couple dozen, it won't be too consequential." WRONG. One rack is about 30 trays, the number of trays I gave the new feeding regimen to was at least 1600, and once the eggs weren't getting eaten, we started getting HUGE amounts of hatchling larvae. Not just record numbers, but records that beat the previous ones by an order of magnitude. Trays that have been fed mostly by my coworkers are pretty barren, but the ones fed mostly by me throughout December are just saturated with worms. Defining the baseline capacity from around the time I was hired as 100%, I estimate we were down to 30% capacity, and now it's bumped up to at least 600%. I'm not exaggerating; 60% of our floor space is just empty, and at this rate we'd be on track to fill up ALL our empty floor space. We've only been collecting the hatchlings out of the racks I fed for 2 days, but half the department already knows that this is the best harvest we've ever gotten. My experiment took maybe 40 hours of labor to do, and it's going to increase revenue by $250,000 at the very least. Over the course of a year this would prospectively generate several million dollars, a noticeable fraction of the company's budget.
:FrogPog: :worm-pog: :beetle-pog: :worm-pog: :comrade-fly:
It's very clear at this point that I know how to manage the department better than my supervisor, who only does 5 hours of supervision of my department per week (it's not the only department he runs), or the lackey he brought over to be "team lead" and deal with most day-to-day stuff. But if either of them find out what's going on, they're going to take credit for what I've discovered, and be able to bring the department back themselves. Right now my boss is probably saying to himself "haha look, it rebounded all on its own, just like I said it would".
I want to prove to the higher-ups that my actions have rescued the department, that I've generated tons of profits for the company, that my supervisor had been running it into the ground and it would be losing money if it weren't for me. Then I want to see if I can negotiate a promotion for myself and a raise for my coworkers. But I've never done anything like this before. I have made a lot of friends in the company, and I think I could get most of my department on board with me, there are only 1 or 2 whom I wouldn't trust not to spill the beans. Upper management is a different issue. This is a workplace with heavily entrenched hierarchies. I'm just a newer guy rocking the boat, but my supervisor is someone they have had a business relationship with for over 10 years; they might just send me packing. Plus it's probably really embarrassing to admit "we don't have any standard operating procedures and we literally cannot count or measure things".
I've already generated one big wave of production. Do I revert back to the old feeding patterns (letting more mealworms die), wait a couple months, watch the production drop back down, and then point to the smoking gun? Or do I just go all in right now and try to push the claim that 4 months of decline was due to my boss, and 1 month of spectacular rebound was due to me? Or should I abandon the whole company, try to get my hands on warehouse space, and go into the same business myself so I can outcompete them in The Market (TM)? And if I can get upper management to the negotiating table, what should I ask for, for myself? Double the wages? An employment contract that's harder to break? Bonuses for hitting targets? Commissions? What do?
It's very hard to break habits in an established environment, even more so if there are social bonds to consider. If you think you've got the resources to start your own competition I would go that route. Just know that it's going to lead to even bigger challenges. You can consider recording everything you do and start up a social media aspect to it to try and supplement your income. Even going so far as to start a scalable open source kind of process. I'm just spitballing here. I was the guy asking you if you thought it would be possible to scale this into distributed mutual-aid like community groups, to give you an idea of where my head is at. Um, you also have to consider as to whether or not you have any sort of non-compete/non-disclosure issues to worry about and if you think they would go after you for sharing company secrets.
Tell your supervisor how you did it, but give them a really bad idea. Then when your supervisor presents it to the higher ups, they will get admonished for giving such a bad idea. If the supervisor decides to throw you under the bus, and the higher ups ask you about it, say "THAT'S how they told you the idea? Wow, that's a terrible summary. HERE'S what I actually did..."
I have something like that up my sleeve, actually. I've told a couple coworkers an alibi so that if that they leak it, it'll be false info that will drop production to the low-level status quo ante.
But is control over an employee worth more than, say, 5 million USD a year?
The things is they can basically get both. Once they know how you did it, you've lost the object of their desire, so they really don't need to give you anything or even retain you. Now there could be more that you could improve their processes and yields, but that's hypothetical, and since it seems like there's a paucity of people in charge who are thinking about the real terms of production, they might not value your ability to improve things very highly.
Do not tell anyone how you have accomplished what you have without securing the fucking bag first. Preferably a nice contract you can't get fucked out of. Maybe you can get some stock. Becoming a competitor would be great under ideal circumstances, but it would almost certainly mean fighting the company at all the non-production levels of business. Maybe they try to prevent you from supplying people, or slap you with some lawsuit that paralyzes you until you're drained of funds - and they might be able to figure out what you did and reassert dominance that way.
Do not tell anyone how you have accomplished what you have without securing the fucking bag first. Preferably a nice contract you can’t get fucked out of.
That was my thought too. I just don't really know how to go about the negotiation. I have some vague intuition, and I'm a rather courteous and diplomatic person, but I'm not a fantastic poker player. Good at talking and elaborating but bad at intimidating.
Do you think I should talk to a labor/employment lawyer?
Definitely talk to someone with more expertise than us. consulting a lawyer seems like a good idea. In the meantime, whatever you do, don't tell anyone what you figured out. In fact, you should probably desist from your new practice, sorry to the bugs.
To clarify, my supervisor is a guy who worked his way up from the bottom (I think). He puts maybe 20% of his time into my department and 80% of his time into the other department he runs, which is much larger.
What do you mean by "vertical capture"? It is not a subsidiary of any other company. I'm pretty sure it's fully local. We have our own branded product that we sell directly to zoos and stuff.
I think what Bearington is trying to say is that just that - what good is 5 million a year for management if you wind up replacing them?
Not mine. They have like 3-4 cameras for the whole department, but that only covers a small fraction of the space. Maybe 2-3 people in the department are on camera most of the time. Even if I was covered on camera all the time, someone trying to find out what I was doing would have to be scrutinizing my actions in comparison with everyone else's incredibly closely.
Ever since I started over a year ago there's been a lot of people slacking off. Maybe 20% of the time is people on their phones or just standing around, and the only time people have gotten in trouble for it is when they did it right in front of one of the cameras.
A lot of it is just security theater; I'm pretty sure they don't check the security camera footage unless something is going really wrong (like vandalism or theft).
So far you did not screw up at all! You learned something big that could help you start your own small beetle company, if you choose to go that route! It is an option even if trying to use this knowledge for leverage doesn't work out. It sounds like you already know most of the ins and outs, just a matter of getting a small business loan and some peeps from that company to come help out.
Are there other mealworm feeding operations in your company? Or is it just you? If there's others then you don't have to let any mealworms die off, the upper management will shuffle your boss over to the other mealworm stations and will see for themselves that production actually decreases wherever that supervisor goes.
If it's just you with the mealworms, then you should just try to negotiate after seeing if some of your co workers would join you in abandoning the company, too. Don't tell anyone anything about what you know, that intellectual property is your leverage now, don't give it away. Don't do the other thing where you revert back to the old feeding patterns yet or else the supervisor will just blame you for the ensuing die off and you get fired. Shit might still go south, and management might want you gone, but you will have the keys to lead your beetle bros and co workers to paradise, hopefully.
This was an entertaining post! Thanks for writing all this up! Buying mealworm futures right now :denguin:
There are between 7 and 15 people in my department and it is the only department that does mealworms. None of the company's products are spread across multiple departments; each one handles all of the operations for at least one kind of bug. Two coworkers are firmly in my camp where we could feasibly have a "take us or leave us" ultimatum at some point. Fortunately, these are the other two people who know the most and the department would be in tatters without them.
I know the ins and outs of production. I barely know anything about the suppliers and marketing and stuff. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard to list all the customers we have, but securing those business relationships and doing everything else to start a company from scratch is something that would have me completely out of my element. That's why my preference is to work within the company, and make an offer saying "create a position that makes this more than a dead-end job, something that gives me some sort of career progression and double the pay, and I'll make sure that I triple your sales of at least one product".
Just make sure you don't come off to management as trying to make a budding u-word, then they'll throw you out even if they believe you'll quintuple production.
What companies use the most meal worms and should i short them?
Small concerning thought; it's possible that any techniques developed on "company time" using their property might be considered their intellectual property. Be very careful how you pitch because at bare minimum they may feel entitled to your documentation on your technique so far.
Yeah I'm gonna keep everything wrapped up and close to the vest.
Attribute the increase to a Christmas miracle while you do a proper experiment with documentation
