Yesterday’s Employee Profiles, “Steve“, took me hours to put together, so here is a shorter one (but sadly not as interesting).
At the time I knew Jeremy, I think the older software Developers tended to be Seniors or Team Leads, then the majority of developers were in the 22-30 age range. Jeremy was probably early 40’s and was just a Developer, so that fact probably illustrated how good he was.
To be honest, I didn’t really know the quality of his work in detail, but just like Steve, he didn’t know many staff members, was quiet, and just generally came across as a bit dim. (Steve was actually a decent developer, he just lacked attention to detail, and then often just played it up for comedy).
“I barely know what I’m doing, never mind innovating”
Jeremy (his thoughts on “Innovation Week”)
There was one time he was waiting to speak to someone so he stood behind their desk, but he was perfectly still; just completely zoned out. I slowly pulled out my phone to try and video him but he suddenly sprang to life.
One day, I overhead his team update, he said:
“I don’t understand what you want; but I don’t think I can do it anyway”
Jeremy
It’s an interesting quote when you think about it. If you don’t understand the requirement, how do you know that you cannot do it? But then you could look at it in another way: If you didn’t understand what they were asking, maybe it is just way above your ability, so you knew you couldn’t do it.
On a colleague’s leaving do, the team went bowling. One person was entering the names but missed Jeremy. It’s not a problem, it was easy to add players in.
“I seem to have been missed oooooout; I want my money baaaaaack”
Jeremy
He actually said calmly, but his slow way of talking just made it hilarious.
There was a manager, Jill, who was leaving. On her last day, she went over to Jeremy and asked if he could give an updated estimate on his work. For some reason Jeremy flipped:
What do you care!? it’s your laaaaaaast day!
Jeremy
Since he was quiet, it was really jarring to hear him raise his voice like that. Must have just had a bad day. I think I will always remember that day for his out-of-character outburst. That’s his legacy.
I found loads of chat logs from work, and additionally found a few quotes I wrote down from various employees. So today we are going to discuss the legendary employee Steve.
“Steve looks like a confused garden gnome that lost his hat”
Adam – colleague
Introduction
Steve joined as a Software Developer, and I think Steve’s carefree attitude meant his code was a bit inconsistent in quality. I liked working with Steve though, he was often quiet and just got on with his work, not really paying attention to anything else. It’s a pro and con really. Work got done (though often you had to prompt him to tidy parts up, or spot mistakes for him to perfect it), but then he didn’t know who many employees were because of the lack of attention around him. When he joined in the banter, he was quite “laddish”. A simple northern lad, Steve was well known to like his food and beer.
I just looked on his Facebook – and under “Political Views” it says “Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong.”
Andy
Sometimes he seemed to be quite unlucky and trivial events became more hilarious. Once, Steve opened up the window to let a butterfly out, and another one came in.
He always wore a t-shirt and even when the aircon was chilly, he loved opening the window. Sometimes even had the fan on whilst sat next to the open window.
Me 13:13:
how come Steve has a different body temperature to everyone else? Sometimes I think he isn't human
Andy 13:13:
haha, has he got his fan on?
Me 13:14:
he has the window open. Last week the air was directed at us so we were freezing. Now we have got him to open a different window, it's not so bad. Although, after a while, it does get freezing but Steve insists he isn't cold. Meanwhile Liam just said "I'm wearing my headset to keep my ears warm"
Knowledge of Colleagues
“I know people that are relevant to me”
Steve
Matt: "Do you remember Colin?" Steve: "No, of course I don't"
“out of all the companies I’ve worked at before, I can only remember about 2 names”
Steve
Me: "Why is Simon leaving?"
Steve: "I don't care"
After our team member Paula moved up to Scotland and worked in our office there, Steve asked if Paula “was on her own, or if there was someone else on her team up there“. Paula is on our team, therefore if someone else was on her team, they would be on our team.
Charlotte asked Steve who wanted all these database changes and he said “John Bundy”. There is no colleague called John Bundy, and there never has been.
Matt: "The documents work item needs moving off the board because the Documents team are doing it"
Steve: "who is doing that? is it Gary?"
Matt: "No, it's Tony. You emailed him about it last week"
Steve: "Oh yeah, I did"
In his update, Steve once said “A chap called Jon Reaves has made some changes”. Jon had worked there for several years and is well known to everyone. Saying “a chap called” suggests he had never heard of him and thought he was new.
Food
Having 2 glasses of wine a week is unhealthy. You should be aiming for 30 units a week, mainly from beer.
Steve
“I’d rather eat my own feet than a KFC”
Steve
“Giving up beer and pizza is never a good idea”
Steve
Tracey was explaining how she went to London and had a fancy meal in Gordon Ramsey‘s restaurant. Steve chimes in:
“I went to Sheffield and had a kebab”
Steve
Matt: "I tried loads of stuff in Vietnam, no idea what it was"
Steve:[loud and affirmatively] "Bollocks"
It could have been testicles, Matt was explaining the interesting and different meals they have there, but it was funnier the way he said it like he had no doubt it was that.
“Four pints is what I call breakfast”
Steve
Steve was complaining that the office canteen has had “Toad in the Hole” for 2 days running. I said “I bet you ate it anyway”. Then he replies in a passive-aggressive tone:
“what else am I gonna do? eat the vegetarian option? Not likely.”
Steve
We once had 2 offices located close together. Our team had moved to the other office but we received a mass email from Mark stating he had brought cake in and placed it in the kitchen. Steve started walking to our kitchen (in the different office), Matt told him it’s not in that kitchen… but Steve checked anyway! He was desperate for that cake.
“Chickens come from seed which comes from oil”
Steve
Matt was originally talking about cars. Then Steve said all food comes from oil, then said that. I was instantly lost.
Software Development/Attitude to Work
“Matt! Myself and Phil are having a bit of a disagreement, and it’s about to turn to blows”
Steve
Matt: "Steve, have you done your Information Governance training?" Steve: "I did it last year" Matt: "what does the email say?" Steve: "It said it is fine" Matt: "Read it again"
In our team “Retrospective” meeting, we had to vote for “Team Member of the Sprint”. Steve voted for me. Matt asked him for the reason and he said
“I was hoping there wasn’t a second round of questioning”
Steve
A few weeks after finishing the Online Request project:
“Do you know how to switch on ‘Online Requests’?”
Steve
Me 13:41 guess how many unread emails Steve has. It's like he has been on holiday for weeks Dan 13:42: 100 Me 13:42: way higher Dan 13:42: 500 Me 13:42: closer, higher! Dan 13:42: I give up Me 13:43: 550
No wonder he didn’t know what was going on.
His manager, Matt once stood at his desk and simply stated “Steve”, and Steve was baffled. I correctly assumed it was his one-to-one meeting. Even after Matt told him to check his calendar, Steve was still baffled what it could be. Classic Steve. Probably a meeting request in one of his unread emails.
We once had a meeting located in the main office. All our team dialled in remotely apart from Steve. From the video feed, we saw him walk into the meeting room late and say something to Adam.
Andy 12:36:
did you see Steve randomly turn up to the meeting?
funny as can be
Me 12:36:
yeah
Andy 12:36:
Mia had tears streaming down her face
Me 12:36:
why?
Andy 12:36:
cos why did he turn up when everyone else on his team dialled in
Me 12:37:
did he ask Adam if he was at the right meeting?
Andy12:37:
yeah!
“I was thinking of going for ‘Looks Good’ because there’s too many files”
Steve on doing Code Reviews. Too many files gets instant approval.
Charlotte: "what did everyone think of the meeting yesterday?"
Steve: "What meeting?"
Charlotte: "the meeting with Ronnie"
Steve: "oh, that. I'll be honest with you. I wasn't listening. I have no idea what was said"
Steve took an extended lunch break, and then later he went for a long walk. Matt challenged him on it "Didn't you go out for lunch as well?"
Steve said "yes" with a right cheesy grin
Doesn't care.
“Soon, I’m gonna be introducing lots of bugs. I’ve nearly finished my work; and I’m not dev-testing it”
Steve
Dan 16:18:
is he… what!? is he trying to get fired in the same way you'd act like a jerk to encourage your partner to split up so you get to feel morally superior?
Me 16:18:
haha, great example
A similar example…
Matt: "Steve, are you sure these changes haven't broken anything?"
Me (with fake confidence): "Yeah, because he ran the unit tests"
Steve: "Have I? I only ran the build"
Steve wrote a unit test with the following test data (Michael Jackson).
Me 13:53:
user.Surname = "O'Cake";
user.GivenName = "Pat";
Andy M13:53:
i'm sure i've seen that before
Me 13:54:
reminds you of your days in Pre-school
singing children's songs
Me 14:14:
OMG STEVE IS HILARIOUS
Matt googled Pat O'Cake and its a character from Bottom. He asked Steve about it, and he said "I wouldn't Google them all though, sometimes I use pornstar names"
Then a week later:
private const string _vouchingUser = "Bearstrangler McGee";
Andy 10:52:
wtf
Me 10:52:
Steve special
I never dare search for anything Steve puts in unit tests after he said "I sometimes use porn star names"
Andy 10:54:
haha
i hope that's not the name of porn star
Then there were some interesting reasons:
Me 14:48: "CancellationReason\": \"patient has lost keys to handcuffs\" why is Steve different? Andy 14:48: what the hell? Me1 4:48: const string cancellationReason = "patient was visiting a massage parlour"; Andy 14:49: is he checking this stuff in?! Me14:49: yes, it's in our branch Andy14:50: he's an absolute lunatic
Steve was working on fixing a bug that Matt was also fixing (but we didn’t know it at the time). The next day Matt and Steve were both on annual leave, so Matt had handed his work over to me, and Steve handed his over to Jim. I finished my work, and Jim even passed my code review without even realising the similarity. It’s like a comedy show sometimes.
Steve had completed a feature, but his changes had broken Matt’s last bug fix.
“it worked for my user story”
Steve. It’s like the classic “it worked on my machine” that software developers love to say
Steve completed the work for saving Users to the database. I just tried it and it crashed. We asked him how much testing he did and he claimed it was all working. I showed him and he said “I forgot about that way”. There are only two scenarios, add from existing user, and add new user.
“I don’t think the Database Tool is working. I think it is completely goosed”
Steve
I just caught Steve smurf naming even though in his last code review, Phil told him not to. So then he looks up Smurfs on wikipedia. He clicks Smurfette and says “I’ll see if she is fit“.
I have no idea who brought a “dunce hat” in, but we decided that if you somehow break the build, then you wear the hat. Steve wore the hat quite a bit.
“I don’t need to wear the hat; I haven’t broken the build. I’ve just broken the product”
Steve
Not sure how he did it, but Steve once sent code to review which had the same title as the previous change he did. It also had the wrong User Story linked to it. (－‸ლ)
I told Steve that he was supposed to roll back one of his work items. After a few seconds he said it was done. I was sceptical. He said that I had already deleted the other part of the change. So I looked, and I hadn’t. He then said
“to be honest, I didn’t even look at it. I didn’t even compile it”
Steve
Miscellaneous
“Any advice that starts with ‘do not expose’ is good advice”
Steve
Liam was telling Steve that an angry resident left him a note on his car telling him not to park there again. Steve then comes out with this…
“Just piss through their letterbox”
Steve
We were playing badminton after work, and Steve said he had to rush off. Mike asked “are you doing something interesting?”. He said his parents were coming over later and he had a massive stash of weed to hide or smoke.
“I accidentally googled porn with my mum on mother’s day”
Steve
He was helping her with a crossword and the clue was “goddess of nature” and he wrote “goddess of mature“
An “Employee Forum” was created recently. Each month, a group of representatives from different departments talk about suggestions and complaints – to try and improve life at work. These are then proposed to Senior Management or Human Resources to hopefully implement.
Personally, I can’t imagine this lasting because many suggestions are illogical or have just descended into madness – and there’s only been two meetings over the 2 months.
I think no matter how good things are, people will always suggest more time off, higher pay, or both. Many of these suggestions do involve more time off, and it seems we have tried every angle already.
Some of these suggestions have company responses already.
Offices are not being used. Are managers encouraging the use of them?
Response: Will re-communicate about the offices to encourage colleagues to use them.
My take: Since we now are all home-working, the office is barely used. It’s optional for people to work so some people work there permanently if their home isn’t suitable, or they come in when their team does. Now it ain’t an “office”; it is a “collaboration hub”. I think it’s important to include this one in the blog to set the scene. The office improvement suggestions are funnier given that the office is under-utilised; it’s like they want more perks than we had before when the office was 100% full capacity – which doesn’t make financial sense.
What is the official business position on dogs in the office?
Response: Dogs are not permitted in the office. Multiple reasons are behind this, such as colleagues with allergies, or aversion to dogs. A dedicated area for dogs within each office is also not permitted.
My take: Did people ever want dogs in the office before? This isn’t the strangest suggestion, but this is what I mean by descending into madness. How was this one of the first suggestions? Surely we should prioritise bigger issues.
Would we consider offering everyone an extra day holiday for life events?
Notes: Representatives discussed and came to the conclusion it’s fairest for it to be a birthday specific holiday because other life events, such as wedding day, may not apply to all. Will take this to HR.
My take: I like how the representatives consider a wedding day might not apply to all, but later they soon forget this and start demanding more maternity leave/pay; even though that is for child-bearing women specifically. You can never really be consistently inclusive anyway.
The general sentiment of a birthday holiday is nice, but then there will be people that will say they are too busy at work to take it off, so then will want the day off later. May as well just increase everyone’s holiday allowance by 1 rather than dictating a specific day.
Could we move to a 4-day working week approach that other businesses are adopting?
Notes: This means working 4 days of standard hours with the same 5 day salary. Representatives discussed how this would work in supporting our main customers who operate 24/7. Will take this to HR.
My take: Imagine the conversation that person has with HR: Representative: “what do you think of an extra day holiday?” HR: “Rejected. Not gonna happen” Representative: “Ok, next question, how about we only work 4 days?” HR: “what? no!” Representative (as we will see later): “How about loads more holiday?” HR: “get out of here!”
I have heard some claims that working 4 days is more effective. I can actually see it both ways. When it is Friday, people often take longer breaks or work slower because “it’s Friday”/”it’s nearly the weekend”. If you remove the Friday, some people may work faster to get the same amount of work done, or they could just adapt the “it’s Friday” thought to “it’s Thursday”.
The Return to Work Program needs to be rethought.
Notes: An example of this is an employee who came back to work in December from maternity leave and was told from HR that the ‘Return to Work’ program starts in April (apparently runs every quarter) so she would have to wait a good 3 months to get the return to work support.
Response: We need to address this.
My take: Well, this just sounds like a dumb thing we do. How has the return to work program failed that much? What does this Return To Work program even involve? Are people introduced to any new employees and told about new/changed processes? Surely you would be aware after 3 months back at work anyway.
Offices used to have refreshment options available on site: vending machines, fresh fruit, and hot drinks machines, and a canteen serving hot food. The only facilities now are tea/coffee.
My take: What do you expect here? We had a canteen, fruit, and vending machines because the office was full. It currently operates on less than 10% capacity. It doesn’t seem feasible to supply fresh fruit. Vending machines are a possibility since the products will have a longer shelf life (but I bet those are pricey to rent anyway). Canteen was nearly shut down on a few occasions because it wasn’t profitable enough. A different office also requested they want a Canteen and even suggested people would pay a monthly fee to run it. It used to cost £3.75 per hot meal and I used it most days so I was spending ~£75 a month if there’s 20 work days. The fee would be significantly higher than this to make that profitable with fewer numbers of staff using it. No way are they going to pay that. Can’t people just buy some food on the way to the office? I think we still have microwaves if you want to warm food up. If not, ask for the microwaves back!
The UK Parental Leave policy is not very competitive
My take: Not sure how we compare to other companies but I’ve found that women can take something like 9 months maternity, get 1 month full pay, then can take 2 months unpaid leave, then return to work on reduced hours. What more do they want? Maybe it’s controversial and a minority view, but I don’t think people need to be encouraged to start families or be paid at their employers expense. We are paid to work, not chill out, but you wouldn’t think it with the requests for more holiday, reduced working hours, more social events etc.
Compared to many other companies, our Maternity policy and pay is very basic. This could be a deterrent to people wanting to start families. The return bonus is a good feature, however doesn’t assist with the cost of living whilst on Maternity leave.
My take: It is such an outrage; it’s on here twice! Seems the current policy is a “deterrent”, so I was wrong and people need to be encouraged to start families, then receive a “Return to work” bonus to get them back in. Insane. Also, what do they mean with “cost of living”? We mostly work at home now, so the costs of chilling at home shouldn’t increase.
Can we build a few bug hotels and bird tables in the gardens?
My take: “What? We can’t bring dogs in? What about bugs?” WTF. I hadn’t even heard of a “bug hotel” until now. Who is suggesting this nonsense? It’s making me angry reading this. Might make some sense if the offices were full, but they aren’t.
People who currently have an entitlement of 28 days annual leave should still be allowed to purchase 5 days, otherwise it is a scheme that doesn’t apply to many (it’s really 2 days purchase available).
My take: I think new employees have 25 days plus the usual bank holidays, then over years of service, it can go up to 28. But then you can purchase days up to 30. So the ask is that we should be able to buy 5 regardless of current allowance.
Recently, I was saying to some of my colleagues that 28 days is a fantastic annual leave and those in the USA barely get any leave at all which surely would make them go insane. But look at us chillers, we want more than 28 days!
Can we review holiday entitlement for length of service and/or senior roles? After 14 years, I have 28 days per year, whereas rival companies are on 35 to 38.
My take: They wanted to buy 5 days on top of 28 for a total of 33. Now they have increased their demands. “Can’t we just have 38 instead?” What’s the next demand? “Buy 5 days on top of 38”? Do we still want our birthday off as well? These demands are just escalating.
Can we get a fleet of ‘Boris’ bikes to allow people to get off-site and obtain lunches from local businesses without the need to get in their cars or walk across muddy fields?
My take:Boris bikes refers to what they have in London where you can rent bikes to cycle around London. Here is a bonus fact: even though Boris Johnson was the London Major when the bikes were introduced, it was actually the former mayor Ken Livingstone that started working on the plan.
So we want to hire bikes to cycle to get food. The nearest supermarket is literally 10 minutes if you walk slowly and there’s only fields if you leap over the wall onto private land, so no idea where that false claim has come from. If you walk the other direction, there’s a few shops where you can buy food within 5 minutes walk (and can take a scenic detour through a park; no muddy fields this direction either), and a few pubs that serve lunch also within a 10 minute walk.
They want bikes because they are too lazy to walk, but would they cycle? isn’t that more effort? Locking/unlocking the bike at your start and end destination. Probably have to put a helmet on for health and safety. The extra hassle if the bike gets stolen… ain’t nobody got time for that.
Subsidised Pet Insurance – Wellness Allowance, £360 per annum to cover anything health related, Gym, massages peloton etc
My take: why not just ask for an extra £500 wage increase?
Anyway, I’ve got tired of critiquing these demands. I vote to stop the Employee Forum. It has clearly got out of hand already, and there is no way the majority of these are even going to be considered. I think all that will happen is that we will be encouraged to use the current offices more (and they may reinstate a vending machine if we do), and I could see maternity benefits being increased slightly. Everything else will be laughed at.
My previous blog was a review for the game “Game Dev Tycoon” which was relevant to this blog due to being directly about software development. “Say No! More” isn’t about software development, but it is about office culture and seems like a social commentary on people being overly obedient to please managers in order to progress through the hierarchy.
You play as an office intern who starts a new job alongside two others. The boss introduces the company and jokes that you have to say “yes” to go far. One of the interns is excited because she is someone who loves saying “yes” and pleasing managers.
Your character struggles to speak but he soon finds a cassette player with a motivational tape which teaches him to say “No” with confidence.
This manager has left his lunchbox at home so he steals yours. This leads you to chase him to his office to get it back, but you are constantly stopped by your colleagues with random requests. You shoot them down with your newly learned word: saying “no”.
“Can you get me a coffee?” “no!”
“Can you copy these documents?” “no!”
There’s even a few dialogues where you can wait for something different to happen, but there’s no negative repercussions if you do say “No” to them. The movement is automatic with on-rails movement and you just press a button to say “no” and move on.
In each chapter, your character listens to more of the motivational tape, and so he learns new powers like charging up your “NO” for a more forceful statement, or sarcastically laughing, clapping or nodding which catches people off guard, allowing you to shout them down. You also learn different tones: cold, heated, crazy, lazy. However, it doesn’t actually make a difference even though the Tutorial makes out that these different types are necessary against some people.
The game hasn’t really got any gameplay, it’s more of a humorous experience, relying on the comedy, quirkiness, and the ragdoll/destruction you see when you say “no” and knock them down.
I say it does succeed; it did keep me entertained for the 1.5 hours. If it was longer, then it would become tedious. It reminds me of Weebl’s cartoons; its wacky style, combined with some of the “No” voice samples which sounds like “Weebl and Bob“‘s way of speaking.
Colin was a developer I originally wrote loads of stories about after he got unfairly promoted to Senior Developer. There was more injustice a few years later, when he found himself promoted to Principal Developer. Weirdly, his work best-friend always got promoted at the same time, or close to it, so he eventually found himself as a Technical Architect even though he is the shyest person that I know at work, and he has low productivity.
I’m not sure if Colin has some dirt on the Development Managers or the Directors but he seems to have so much influence now. My close colleagues also think it is farcical but laugh it off when I say he must have some dirt on the senior management. But how else can you explain these nonsensical decisions?
Near the end of last year, the Directors announced they would be hosting an Employee Awards event to celebrate people, or team’s achievements.
I’ve never been happy with these in the past because awards usually go to people whose managers are enthusiastic about such awards, or are charismatic enough to persuade the awards panel that their line-report/team deserves something. Or, it goes to a team that was assigned a project that was worth loads of money, regardless if it was actually a great success.
Anyway, our team (well, really it is a group of teams) got one of the awards even though I don’t think we have done anything particularly great, and many of the items Colin has been involved in have led to a few Major Incidents.
Furthermore, Colin got Global Employee of the Year.
Employee of the year!
Global!
HUGE impact on our customers through his amazing work following the issues we had earlier in the year, Colin was instrumental in most of the changes that have since been applied, and made such a difference. He led the team to ensure that everyone was able to contribute and fully felt supported and Colin’s high standards in “collaboration”demonstrate the best in our corporate values.
Director
So in multiple offices in the UK, India, and all those smaller companies we seem to buy out and then we don’t hear much from them – Colin is deemed to have contributed the best work last year. So he gets a promotion, a team award, and the highest-rated individual award.
Absolutely ridiculous. I think I have written this many times in the blog, but if I was someone reading it, and was familiar with previous blog entries about Colin – I certainly would not believe this was a real thing that happened.
I had a call with Colin and he said he has been really stressed this week. There were 3 Major Incidents, 4 people across the teams he is managing have resigned, and he has had to sack his work best-friend Technical Architect (no idea why this happened – it is rare that we sack people but it will be a blog entry if I find out).
You would think morale would be high if a team (or group of teams) were performing well enough to win an award. Yet we are 5 people down across these teams, another is on long-term illness, and I don’t think we were producing much when we were fully staffed. Colin sure has a job to do here.
A few years ago, an “Employee Forum” was created to discuss Women’s issues at work. If there are issues like wage inequality, then I’m all for it, but I just didn’t understand why we formed this. I hadn’t heard any complaints, but I suppose they aren’t gonna complain to me. If anything, I think women are treated better at work.
I was thinking about this scenario recently which I’ve known to happen several times now. A woman is about to have a child, so they manage to take a full year off. 9 months for the actual maternity leave as a starting point. Apparently those 9 months accrue holiday allowance as if you were actually working, and any bank holidays during this time are also added to your holiday allowance too. So it ends up accumulating to around 4 weeks annual leave. Then they ask for 2 months unpaid leave and get it. May as well round it up to the nearest year, right?
Instead of worrying about returning to work and people being promoted ahead of them, they somehow manage to also pre-arrange a promotion, so they actually jump ahead of their team. They have 1 year less experience than their team, aren’t aware of things that happened at work in that year, yet get promoted ahead of them. Sometimes even going part-time too.
I’m not just saying this is unfair to men. There’s sometimes loads of women in their team, and yet they just have to work that year as normal, and might actually be denied a promotion because of this person that will return in the promoted role. It’s like we overcompensate because we don’t want to be accused of discrimination.
Now men cannot get pregnant, but what happens if they want a year off? One man wanted to see his family that lives in Australia, but he decided it would be nice to live with them for a year. He asks for a “Sabbatical” but gets denied. He is told that there will be positions available in his role in a year’s time, so he can just re-apply for his job. So as planned, he quits and goes to Australia. After a year, he returns to England, he comes in for the interview and gets rejected!
I don’t see how that is fair. He wanted 100% unpaid leave for a year, then to come back to his standard job. Yet, women get various pay for their time away: some full pay, half pay, and often a promotion with some scope for working less hours. Then they are taking time out of work to discuss “issues” in this Employee Forum.
I think both these reasons are fundamentally the same reason – you want time away for “family” and it’s much better for your mental health not to have to think about work. I’m not sure if it is the right thing to randomly decide these things, or seemingly decide based on gender.
Last year, we hired someone as a Communications and Engagement Coordinator and she came up with a “Guess The Employee” game. You are given a few clues, and if you guess who it is, you can win a £25 Amazon voucher. The thing is, we are quite a big company, and I only know people in Development, Support, and maybe know a few names of Directors.
I don’t even think I know most people well enough to know facts about their personal life either. For a few of my closest work friends I would – but then I don’t imagine they would be selected as a candidate. So even if there’s some really easy clues, how am I meant to know Becky from Marketing, or Mark from Finance?
I imagine they only choose senior managers from each department as possible answers, since theoretically they would be more well-known. However, the people that know them the best will be their managers – so you are then awarding high-ranking managers and directors.
Recently we had this clue:
I display good performance for our customers, but I have been known for handing out red cards for other’s poor performance.
Obviously it is the “Customer Support Director”! He was a qualified Football Association referee, assigned to the North West Counties league.
£25 was awarded to a Director for knowing this.
Surely the Employee Engagement officer should come up with ideas that can engage lower-ranking staff rather than games that Directors can play.
Managers often talk about “allocating resources” when discussing project teams. I don’t understand why we are dehumanizing people. Why can’t we just say people/staff/developers? If we are talking about money or hardware, then it’s fine to use the term “resources”. However, the term seems to be embedded in the business culture since the department that deals with people is often known as “Human Resources (HR)”.
I was watching all the Bourne films recently, and in the scenes where you see staff in the agency office who are monitoring security monitors – they say lines like “Asset is on the move”. It probably makes sense here to dehumanise people; because your end goal is to kill them, so calling them “assets” and using terms like “dispose”/”eliminate” probably removes you from the fact that this is a person who has feelings and a family, and you’re about to end them. Maybe managers talk about people in this way so it’s easier when it comes to redundancies. “Cut 10% of the resources, and move on”.
I think it isn’t even that effective to talk about people using their job roles. When managers only look at the Job Titles and not the individual skills, then they end up creating imbalanced teams. This could be that you need to spread a certain skill across teams such as SQL Databases, so a manager who only looks at Job Titles could end up putting the people with SQL skills together.
Additionally, some Seniors aren’t that great, and therefore lower-ranking Developers are better than them. I’ve definitely seen it happen where managers create a team consisting of 3 underperforming seniors, then wonder why it isn’t working. This was a source of my frustration a few years back and was some major motivation to start this blog.
Creating a team based on 3 underperforming developers is a rarity, but a recent trend for us is to have only 1 Senior leading a few Developers and a Junior. If the Senior isn’t very good, then the team has no guidance at all.
In conclusion, I think managers should show respect to staff and refer to them as people (not “resources”). They should also try to understand where individual people’s skills are, rather than simply making assumptions based on a Job Title. This should lead to better balanced teams. Balanced teams should lead to high performance and morale.
Where I work, we go for long periods with barely anyone leaving the business, then we seem to be hit with several at once. There’s been a few people leave recently when we announced we would switch from the standard Agile process to SAFe.
With this restructuring, some roles did change but I think it was mainly people that weren’t affected like Software Developers.
I was talking to one of my colleagues, and he said
“Why are people leaving? it sounds like we will still be using the same technologies”
Developer
The thing is, Developers will leave if you make them use different languages, and Developers will leave because they want to learn something new, so you cannot win.
I think some people may be leaving because they don’t believe our new software will ever get finished, then they have used the news of the process change as a final trigger to leave.
It seems quite stupid to me though – a change in management/process often makes people leave, even though leaving means you are dealing with a new management/process anyway in your new company.
It happened when we moved from Waterfall development to Agile. It also happened when we moved offices, and we have moved 3 times; even though it’s always been 10 minutes walk at most to the new location. If you come by car, it’s not even a problem unless the parking situation is different.
“OMG IT IS DOWN THE ROAD, I AM LEAVING to an office further away”
Stupid staff member
I remember with one office move, I was in the new office kitchen and talking to a Developer who was leaving. He said “I’m sick of these office moves”. I pointed out that we were literally standing in the new office, so he has already gone through the hassle of moving. He said he was only here because he had to serve his 3 month notice period. Yet he was moving to a new job that was probably further away from his house, and would more likely to have more job pressure because it’s very relaxed where I work. Also, since we had moved office, you could essentially guarantee we would stay there for at least 2 years because of the building lease. At a new job, you will more likely have to move offices within that time period.
In my mind, a change should be an encouraging aspect to make you stay, unless one of the changes has a negative impact on why you liked the job. In my experience, it seems a lot of people don’t see it that way.
I saw this statement posted online by a software developer (I won’t name them as to not call them out directly, although you could probably find it if you searched hard enough) and thought it was rather odd:
“Crying at work is normal and it happens to everyone”
Sad developer
As expected, people responded, telling her this isn’t normal. I would have thought it would be due to
Toxic working environment
Bad/bullying managers (maybe ties into point A)
Personal issues; not work related
Maybe hypersensitive person
The thing is, if the job is that bad that it makes you cry, then you probably need to leave. Personal issues are understandable to cry, and it can easily happen in work-hours, but then it’s not “normal”; as in an everyday occurrence. If it’s a personality trait of such an individual to easily cry, then again, it is not “normal” because the average person wouldn’t react that way.
I asked one of my colleagues what he thought about it:
“if your work makes you cry, that’s quite a clear indication you should move on”
colleague
So he has the same line of thinking as me.
The original poster tries to clarify, ruling out that it’s a problem with the company culture or particular members of staff.
“If your job is making you feel upset or unsafe, that’s a different problem. But I often feel overwhelmed with coding and cry it out.”
Sad developer
This makes me think it is more related to point D, or maybe there’s not enough team support. If it gets to the point where you have been defeated, there should be other developers that can help you solve the problem.
She then posts a response to all the people that are still telling her it isn’t normal:
All the people saying “this isn’t normal, you shouldn’t cry at work“: there was the pandemic, many people are isolated and struggling. If I want to cry at work, I will. To anyone who thinks otherwise, I wouldn’t want to work with someone of that mentality.
Sad developer
For me, this ties into the personal issue scenario. This one is understandable but it’s not really work related. I’d say that can be partially solved by supporting team members and managers.
The thing is, I thought they were backpedalling a bit here, and rather than retracting the word “normal”, they were still trying to justify their statement. Additionally, the theme did sound familiar, and I did some more searching to see if I could find a previous quote from them. I was correct, I had read this before. This was from a time people worked in the office:
“I wish I could go back 5 years and tell myself that there would come a day when I wouldn’t cry at work each week and I would feel confident in my programming skills. It takes a long time but at some point you’ll realize how far you’ve come.”
Sad developer
Each…week. Damn.
So they were definitely trying their best to justify their statement rather than retracting it. It wasn’t about the pandemic at all, they just cry when their code doesn’t work, but they won’t accept that it’s not a normal reaction.
I think telling people it is normal is bad advice. I’m still going to stick with my opinion that it’s either a terrible place to work, or you have issues. Advising people to not leave the toxic job, or to not seek help for whatever problems they have – is definitely bad advice.
However, to play devil’s advocate and argue with myself, I did a quick Google search and found a few articles that quote the job site Monster who (apparently) performed a survey with 3,000 respondents. Apparently 8 out of 10 people have cried at work. Of those:
45% stated it was because of their bosses or co-workers.
19% stated personal, non-work issues.
15% stated workload,
13% said they were upset over workplace bullying.
I assume 8% were other reasons.
Note I stressed the word “apparently”. Weirdly, all of the articles I found didn’t link to Monster, and I searched Monster’s website and also tried to use Google to find the source. I saw evidence of a survey for that time, but no statistics on crying. There’s also an article about crying, but then it links to one of the news articles I found! Why would Monster quote a news article that says Monster did the survey when they could just quote themselves.
So what are we concluding? I’m one of the emotionless 20%, or crying isn’t normal and there’s some weird conspiracy.
Stranger Coding Tings 