Their idea was to mandate all cameras being on for every meeting because the lack of cameras is definitely why we all hate working here.
It's like I was talking to an alien, I explain the long work hours, the constant cutting of staff, ever increasing micromanagement and forced to be in a shitty office WHERE WE CAN'T EVEN GET A DESK COS ITS TOO BUSY. Constant layoffs constant breathing down our necks and never ending barrage of meetings where concerns raised for not being able to do any work during the FUCKING WORK DAY is just addressed with a shrug and inference that we should do work out of hours to make time for literal pointless self felating meetings filling up every day.
I explain how the last year was constant never ending crunch while we lose half our team to outsourcing and have to take on 10x more responsibility when we were already understaffed doing the original job. I explain how all planned upcoming work is continued crunch. How we have single people holding up massive systems solo while somehow half of the team is going off to seminars and doing literally fuck all and THEY GET PROMOTED INTO MANAGEMENT. I explain how the size of the team doing any actual real work is 10% the size of the leadership fucking swarm we have of useless idiots who pack every day with meetings just to feel useful. I explain how the answer to every single problem or blocker we face is just "work harder and longer" while they insult everyone in meetings by crying how no one gives feedback and they're "here to help"
The answer? Oh we should be turning our cameras on and put even more meetings in for forced fun sessions...........
Fucking managers
Sounds like leadership is all fighting to keep their jobs too. They're figuring out how to improve their teams without spending any money to impress the bosses with higher numbers on some chart.
Had an old manager that insisted our cameras be on for every stand up. The only thing that really kept this from being enforced was the senior devs that didn't give a shit. Closest thing to worker solidarity we have in the tech industry tbh.
What do you have instead of desks? You mean turning the camera on in the office where they can already see you? How many people wear a mask there?
We have dedicated desks but if you cant get one you basically get the floor, some random chair, stupid bar type stool thing, standing with laptop on a cabinet, meeting room if you're lucky, or my personal favourite the windowsill
So they can't see us because we don't have any single dedicated area for the team so the idea is we come in but talk remotely on calls because 70% of the team resides in a different country and whats left is scattered across several different offices and floors.
No, the person I am referring to in this post came in sick and then shook everyones hand without mentioning they are sick. Nobody wears a mask and everyone comes in when they are sick to spread it
Managers promote those that are seen. They have marketing brain remember, so all they care about is branding. If they chatted with you at a seminar and you bullshit successfully they'll think of you when they shortlist promotions, not the grumpy engineer who is a buzz kill with things like "tech debt is killing us" or "we have two people who can use the backend and one just quit and the other knows we can't fire him so plays WoW classic at work all day."
OP really spent all this time being competent at their role and not on how they appear
I apologise to all the managers for looking like a grumpy computer gremlin instead of being Patrick Bateman and discussing business cardsManagers: ’Apology not accepted, it’s almost as if you haven’t read any Marx nor recognize the clownfiesta inherent to capitalism. Calling into question your susitude now and placing you on a PIP’
other knows we can't fire him so plays WoW classic at work all day
Damn how'd you know? I feel called out
Considering the "culture" there... Why did you think management cared about y'all's input? Not doin a hyperbole, i am curious as to your motivations. Was there a possibility your concerns would be addressed?
I didn't they just caught me as i was about to leave for my mandatory 5 hour lunch break at the pub and wouldn't shut the fuck up asking me questions about how we can boost team morale by forcing cameras on so i told them what i thought.
I basically don't care anymore and was curious to see how they'd respond to being ernest cos i was bored of putting on the corpo ghoul mask
my last place was toxic and dysfunctional as hell. the institution had/has problems, but my department was known for being a disaster and had been as long as I was there (10 years), but getting worse every year. the institution would do employee surveys and the story was always the same: cannot retain talented and valuable staff, the routine loss of institutional knowledge was brutal.
the boss's solution to this was to give more salary bumps to the middle management tier (that drove people away) and to ignore staff reporting documented, verifiable bullying by middle management of junior staff.
it was so bad that they brought in a new middle manager with huge salary and initial offer with promises of full autonomy for selecting and running his team. he left after six months, once he realized how fucked and incompetent everyone else at his level was. and how shit the support staff were treated. the boss was completely embarrassed by how obviously unrecoverable the situation had become.
the boss would blame COVID and work from home as "destroying the culture" of the department and kept trying to force us all back into the office all the time, but all that did was turn the turnover rate up even higher. ultimately the inability to acknowledge reality and the tolerance of bullying induced me to fundamentally re-evaluate my professional life's trajectory and repeatedly apply elsewhere until I got something better, far enough away that I could sever my association.
I think there's a distinction between an organization operating in the neoliberal / capitalist ideological soup that still endeavors to adapt and function within those constraints based on information, and an organization that refuses to even acknowledge reality at a basic level or protect people from trauma for which the organization could be held liable. these are very fundamental requirements of an organization at least trying to preserve itself. nothing about me leaving was honestly heroic... I was just another rat fleeing a sinking ship captained by an aggressively incompetent fool who would go down shifting blame onto whatever he could.
I hear you, just worked my ass off, was helpful resource for my coworkers and did my job well... apparently I'm the only one not getting a raise this year all because of first time poorly implemented KPIs. Fuck off! But remember, we need our employees to have high engagement....
They are delusional and don't care. They are not living in reality and only want to be told what they want to hear to make them feel better.
It reminds me of what you hear about Hitler's last days and his refusal to face the reality of Soviet superiority. In the end, that delusional arrogance cost him everything.
Hey there sweetie, what you don't realize is that you're Pizza Meter is too low. You can't see it because you aren't management. I'll get some pizzas ordered pronto. Oh by the way, the deadlines for everything that were for Friday this week are now for Wednesday. You're welcome!You joke but we had pizza yesterday and the company didn't even pay for it. It was DONATED
I don't know why I'm so curious... who donated the pizza? The pizza place or a customer?
The pizza place. Company too poor to buy 10 pizzas for the mandatory torture session so they beg for some free ones.
Too poor to afford 10 pizzas but rich enough to pay all the middle management
I should try that, see if I can get some food "donated" to my office where I work all by myself.
Reading this raised my blood pressure because a lot of it is the same here (other than not having enough desks, what's up with that?). Hope you can tell them to fuck off and go to a better place soon
Agreed. What's the worst that can happen in such a toxic environment?
"thats really good feedback Gorb how should we tackle this, shall I put in a weekly session"
NO FUCK OFF FUCK OFF I HATE YOU ALL
Struggle sessions, but nobody dies, and only wishes they could die at every session.
I know they know this is how its supposed to work and their job is basically to deflect or snitch on staff who might do something about it but like i just don't get how these people who don't even have a stake in the business fucking love acting like a little fucking tyrant for a little extra pay.
How do they wake up in the morning? How do they look at themselves in the mirror and take themselves seriously.
How do they wake up in the morning? How do they look at themselves in the mirror and take themselves seriously.
the promise of brunch at the weekend combined with reality tv slop in the evenings allows them to avoid anything remotely like self reflection
Death to America
