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 Future War Cultist wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
I know someone who moved from Blockbuster to Woolworths to BHS. They work for Debenhams now.

Has Debenhams been told?

Several years on, this is now more entertaining than ever. I've no idea who they work for now, but I do wonder if they ended up at Wilko.

I'm a college lecturer (UK, so not University equivalent) and I am hating the job. Teenagers/Young Adults are a total mess post pandemic, and the UK education system, including OFSTED and the government, can't seem to get their head around that it is a serious serious problem that we can't do anything about it when funding is horrendous for further education and you only really have 12 hours contact time with the students.

Behavioural issues are just as common as quite severe mental health issues.

I've wanted to do a masters conversion into data science/analytics for a while now.... Might be worth the cost just to save my sanity.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:
I'm a college lecturer (UK, so not University equivalent) and I am hating the job. Teenagers/Young Adults are a total mess post pandemic, and the UK education system, including OFSTED and the government, can't seem to get their head around that it is a serious serious problem that we can't do anything about it when funding is horrendous for further education and you only really have 12 hours contact time with the students.

Behavioural issues are just as common as quite severe mental health issues.

I've wanted to do a masters conversion into data science/analytics for a while now.... Might be worth the cost just to save my sanity.

Might be an idea. I did a week in a school watching teachers and realised it wasn't for me. I can barely stand teaching undergraduates most of the time - not on a personal level, but there's just too many coasting along doing the bare minimum because they feel they need the bit of paper at the end. I can only imagine how much worse it must be when they're actively compelled to be there still.

Secondary teaching at the moment is horrific compared to pre-pandemic. It's just constantly battling against poor behaviour, rudeness and entitlement, and parents who complain over the smallest of issues. We are haemorrhaging quality staff, and can't replace them because we have no money and there aren't enough new teachers coming in, or wanting to stay. At the moment, it just seems like everyone hates teachers, from the government to the parents to the students.

Our senior management is genuinely burying their heads in the sand, in fact, middle management and then upper management are evidently, and actively working from home so they don't have to deal with and acknowledge the behaviour themselves. Genuinely awful, and I could have my salary doubled and I still wouldn't be happy with the conditions.

We have an OFSTED inspection coming anyway, I'll be amazed if we get a good rating, we totally would not deserve it.

I'm a facilities/plant engineer currently, supporting R&D and manufacturing for high-end national security and defense systems. Enjoyed what I did and what I worked on, who I worked with and for, etc. greatly for the first 7 years with the company. I did some cool gak, learned a lot, was given a lot of trust and responsibility, was rapidly promoted and recognized for my contributions at a very high level, had some great mentors and senior folks who took an interest in my career and giving me growth and development opportunities and was being prepped to take next steps to level up.

The past year, not so much. The problems started when my boss announced his retirement last September, along with half my department whk were offered early retirement packages.I was told that his boss would be interviewing me to replace him (which was basically a slam dunk for me as his boss was one of those who took interest in my career and gave me direct tasking and development opportunities). I was basically congratulated for my upcoming promotion by all the other department heads at the meeting in which my boss announced his retirement, as in they literally went "Congratulations on your retirement Big Boss! And congratulations on your promotion chaos0xomega, when are you moving into his office?" But then, a bit more than a week before he was due to retire, his boss very suddenly quit in pretty dramatic fashion. His bosses boss was apparently pissed off and refused to take phone calls or answer questions, etc. So my boss left without my team knowing who we reported to or who was in charge or who would be interviewing me, etc. A few days later we finally had a new org chart flowed down to us with a bit of a restructuring of our business organization, etc. Nothing too dramatic, I knew some of the new senior leaders in my org from past projects I'd worked on with them and was optimistic about the direction things were heading in for us because I thought they were pretty high speed, etc. Then a couple days later, the guy who would have been my new boss had I actually been promoted announced that a guy on my team who reported to me was the new acting site manager.

He was new to the team (only there for 18 months vs 7 years for me) but had a higher title than me even though he worked for me, as he had a very specific skillset we needed and were paying him for, but had no real experience in the majority of what we actually did, had no experience with plant or facilities operations maintenance or management, very little project management and execution experience, zero team management experience, etc. Basically he was a very experienced and highly qualified design engineer who was hired to support the team by doing in-house design work and provide engineering support to the projects team where needed - hecwas good at it but that's only like 20% of what we do as an organization.

I cried foul almost immediately, and his boss was basically like "sorry, nobody told us, we didn't have an org chart for you guys and we weren't able to speak to Big Boss before he left. We just assumed that he was the senior guy based on his title. Don't worry we'll give you an opportunity to interview for the role when we open the req for the permanent position, but the company just declared a hiring freeze so we are stuck for now. For now though he's in charge, it's only fair we let him have this opportunity, think how bad you would feel if you were given this opportunity and then it was taken away from you" - to which I pointed out I didn't need to imagine it because he literally just did it to me. I had communication from my retired boss in writing and a copy of the department succession plan so was able to prove that I was the one who should be in the acting role, etc but they wouldn't budge (kind of understandably I think, it would be somewhat publicly embarrassing in a Steve Harvey kind of way for everyone involved to announce a correction there). I decided to suck it up and be a team player and put my trust in leadership to do right by me when the time came. Big mistake, I should have left then and there.

Acting boss very rapidly demonstrated he was not cut out to do the job and started dropping the ball and creating problems from the getgo. He was also caught doing some sketchy gak, including lying to his boss about what he was working in and who was responsible for what
There was also some questionable behavior that others on my team think was targeted towards me to try to limit my ability to be successful and demonstrate my skills to new leadership, etc.pr otherwise try to harm my reputation - let's just say that I was suddenly being excluded from a lot of meetings and communications that the rest of my department was being included on or which were previously meetibgs that I attended or ran, etc, as if my acting boss suddenly forgot that his former supervisor existed, which was odd because at that point I was 1/5th of the remaining team. There was also a lot of communication that never made it to me pertaining to efforts I was working on, such that I'd do something that I had been planning and then get yelled at because I was supposedly told not to do it that way, etc. (except it was told to acting boss who never passed it along to me). And then there were the projects that had been assigned to me by outgoing boss which suddenly I was no longer working on (without anyone even telling me about it, it was fun how I found out about some of those).

I eventually started lodging complaints with his boss (including documented evidence of all sorts of gak), all I was told basically was "be patient, it's obvious he's inexperienced, none of this is targeted at you, I'm trying to coach him, this will get better I promise, you'll still have an opportunity to interview, and none of the stuff that's happened to you will be held against you, I promise". Nothing got better, and I started applying for internal transfers to other teams and departments to get out of what seemed a gakky situation, to no avail. Eventually I started lodging complaints with HR about the situation and basically begging them for help to get assigned somewhere else, and they basically ghosted me and stopped responding to my calls and emails.

Eventually, acting boss created a big enough crisis that it caused major problems for the production team that rose to the attention of a senior corporate leader. Acting boss blamed his boss for tying his hands and basically said that as acting manager he didn't have authority to make certain decisions and had to rely on his boss who worked at another site 6 hours away to make those decisions for him, etc (in reality he never even communicated this gak to his boss, he himself just dropped the ball and it blew up in his face). Senior corporate leader basically sided with the acting guy and forced my acting bosses immediate promotion and gave his boss a pretty dramatic wrist-slapping for mismanaging his organization and team by not having promoted acting boss sooner, etc. So no interview or promotion for me, and the feth-feth games being played by my now-permanent boss continued.

Within a couple months of his promotion it became apparent to both me and his boss that he was continuing to cause problems. My boss had been instructed to set up a regular 1:1 meeting with me and assign certain tasks to me, which he told his boss he had done but didn't actually. Once it was realized that hadnt been done, there was a 2 month period where his boss was asking me weekly if he had done it yet, to which my response was always "no", until I finally lost my gak and exploded on his boss in a manner that probably should've had me brought to HR myself, but basically I calked out the total lack of accountability and directly called into question my bosses integrity and competency. Around the same time the senior leader that forced my bosses promotion left, which I had hoped would open the door for some changes but nothing materialized though my boss got a talking to and things improved a good bit, though not totally.

I continued to give his boss an opportunity to make things right but nothing has yet materialized after 15 months of having been snubbed for the acting role in the first place. Boss has continued to generally demonstrate he doesn't really know what he's doing and I've been called on to step in and save the day multiple times. While he does have that regularly scheduled 1:1 with me now, he was supposed to have a mandatory mid year performance review meeting with me (literally a corporate policy requirement) which he never did, it's coming up on 4 months past due this week, HR and his boss continue to not hold him accountable though his boss regularly expresses his "disappointment" that he hasnt done it yet and his "hope" that things will improve. More recently I sent his boss a 17-18 page long email calling out what a shitshow the team has become and how transferring my roles and responsibilities to the rest of the team over the past year without any real discussion or planning has made our organization an inefficient and ineffective mess that will have long term consequences for our business ops, including metrics (ex - we currently have over 7,500 open work orders. That number averaged around 180-350 up until my boss retired, but has blown up because the maintenance supervisor who also used to work for me isn't managing to process and nobody on the team is tracking or reporting metrics anymore because new boss doesn't care or understand them and i was told off by his boss when I tried to report them to him instead, before he understood what my role on the team actually was - he thought I was just a project manager when in reality I was our operations manager and projects team lead).

To his credit, my bosses boss took the feedback to heart and basically acknowledged that he fethed up and that I should have been promoted from the getgo and apologized that things got as bad as they have, and that he knows id have done a better job, and that he understands that I'm frustrated because my boss isn't demonstrating himself to be worthy or capable of the opportunity he is given yet, etc. But also basically said that he's committed to coaching my boss and getting the team back to high performance under his leadership and that my boss deserves more chances, etc. Also that as the senior guy on the team he needs me to take this on the chin and carry the rest of the team and keep things going as smoothly as I can until he can rebuild the team and coach my coworkers and boss up to do the things that they should already be doing, etc. And that he "promises" me that he recognizes im the real rockstar on the team and he wishes the rest of his staff was more like me and that there will be some big career advancement opportunities for me in the future but his hands are tied by the current business environment and it might be another 2-3 years before he is in a position to promote me into the role he thinks I should be in, etc.

For me, that was the straw that broke the camels back and I've given up trying to get justice in my current role or transfer internally (the business environment is honestly pretty bad ATM, we've had a lot of turnover in senior leadership and the entire sites business ops are in shambles, given my experiences over the past year it's not hard to imagine why. There's basically no internal openings available and the company has started laying off other teams). Other contributing factors are that over the past 2-3 months I've started getting complaints about my boss from other department heads as well as our vendors and contractors about how my boss is dropping the ball and asking me to do his job for him - I've been forwarding them to his boss, including one from a long-time contractor that has worked with us for 35+ years and maintains mission-critical equipment for us. They've been trying to fulfill a contract with us for the past year and get paid, but my boss has ghosted them, even while he told the team and his boss that the work was completed over the summer - yet another lie). Ive even overheard other senior leaders abd even some of our customers discussing how useless and ineffective my boss is.

Likewise, about 2-3 months back we hired another guy onto the team (who came very highly recommended by others in senior roles within the company)to backfill my bosses old position plus some additional duties (basically, there's also a PM aspect to it as I'm the only remaining project manager on the team and can't keep up with all the work that was previously being done by a team of 3 guys previously). Within about a week, the new guy was complaining to me about all the same crap I was complaining to my bosses boss about. It helped put a lot into perspective for me and that I wasn't just holding everyone to unfairly high standards, etc. He didn't realize that I had been here longest of everyone on the team and that my boss previously worked for me. When he found out he was basically like "why the he'll aren't you in charge, you seemed the sharpest and most on the ball person here from the moment I first met you and you're the only person here who actually seems helpful or even seems to know what they are doing". Last week he put his two weeks in and decided to leave because he can't stand how ineffective and dysfunctional the team is. He even went so far to complain to my bosses boss about what a gak job my boss is doing and outright told him that if not for me he would've quit weeks ago and that it's obvious that I'm the one here who should be in charge, etc. and apparently lavished me with possibly excessive amounts of praise while burning the reputations of everyone else in my department.

So as of last week I've been applying for work elsewhere. I'm probably not going to stay in the defense industry, as I can get about 2x more in the private sector (esp after you account for the promotion i should have received), even if the work isn't necessarily as interesting. Not entirely sure I want to stay in the same type of role though, I have enough project management and continuous improvement experience, as well as manufacturing engineering experience, that I can be kinda flexible in terms of what I do next and I've been casting a wider net, the real challenge is that because I didn't get the promotion I expected my current title is lower than it should be for my level of capability and skill, though my resume otherwise speaks for itself and will hopefully help me bridge the gap and convince employers that I'm not overreaching.

The one wrinkle in this is that a coworker caught my boss discussing the aforementioned 17-18 page email with the head of security, who was apparently accusing me of divulging sensitive information in the email and threatening to investigate me and telling my boss to "keep me in line". The two of then have a pre-existing relationship before my boss was hired here and are known to be buddy buddy and in cahoots. Incidentally (or not) the aforementioned email included accusations against an unspecified anonymous "senior leader" at the site who I caught making discriminatory remarks, bullying employees (myself included), and telling my boss to do some dishonest gak to further his career - that senior leader in question *is* the head of security and the accusations are specific enough that he's no doubt aware that I was borderline calling him out if hes seen the email. I've made some backup copies of various documentation and communications just in case I need to sue someone over workplace retaliation, etc. And I have a meeting tomorrow with my bosses boss in which I intend to discuss this development with him.

Wish me luck, lol.

chaos0xomega wrote:

<snip>
Wish me luck, lol.

Oof. That sounds like a whole not of not fun. Good luck moving forward.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Our senior management is genuinely burying their heads in the sand, in fact, middle management and then upper management are evidently, and actively working from home so they don't have to deal with and acknowledge the behaviour themselves. Genuinely awful, and I could have my salary doubled and I still wouldn't be happy with the conditions.

We have an OFSTED inspection coming anyway, I'll be amazed if we get a good rating, we totally would not deserve it.

Ah mate, that's rough. Our SLT clearly don't know what to do, but they are at least there and trying.

Good luck with OFSTED. We got done last year, and we were deep dived. It was an exceedingly shallow one; I think that they are very much on 'light touch' after Ruth Perry. I was observed. She watched me talk and question my year 13's on literary movements for 10 minutes, then asked me to leave so that she could ask if I 'talk to them.' I hope that it goes well for you.

It is in fact a whole lot of not fun. I don't know how or why I put up with it for as long as I did, I think it's because I had it so good for so long and invested so much into it and had such a promising career that I didn't want to let go of it even when it was obvious I should (he'll, I even had my old boss early on telling me I was getting screwed over and that I should leave promptly knowing I could get at least 50% more elsewhere).

Now though I'm just burnt out, last couple weeks I've stopped caring about my work entirely and am putting in bare minimum effort, I don't like it but I can't muster up anything more. I've had bouts of depression and anxiety over all this for the past year but nothing quite like what I'm experiencing now. It's like I've already quit and checked out mentally but I don't have the new job yet. Only good thing is that me procrastinating and sandbagging it is still greater levels of productivity and responsibility than the rest of my team on a good day lol.

I’ve been at the company I am at now for almost 10 years. Had a couple of promotions in that time, but basically still doing the same thing I was doing 10 years ago. The reason i have stayed so long is because I enjoy what I do and who I do it with. Generally speaking the culture at the company is great and I can see myself staying here for at least another 10 years.

Having said all that I know how quickly things can change. All it takes is for my boss to leave and get replaced by a muppet and suddenly things aren’t looking so rosey. It’s happened to me before in other companies and looking at some of the comments in this thread it happens elsewhere too.

I’ve been at my company long enough to have seen some high profile characters leave (including in the last couple of weeks). Often that person is replaced by someone with grandiose plans who doesn’t last 2 years in the business. A lot of people I work with say there are big changes afoot in 2024, I’ll believe it if I see it though. So far in the last 10 years I’ve managed to stay out of the firing line.

As I said I am under no illusion that things couldn’t go south for me very quickly. This is why I save as much as I can, paying off mortgages and putting a healthy amount into my pension and other investments. Building up some FU money, as people from the US would say.

I’m getting thoroughly sick of senior “leaders” and their “visions”. They come in, ignore the frontline problems that are causing us day-to-day pain in favour of enacting their “strategic vision”, get 18-months in and then bugger off to a shinier looking job somewhere else. Meanwhile their “vision” gets abandoned before it ever gets implemented and replaced by the next person’s “vision” and we’re still dealing with the same gak down in the trenches.

Just to my English teaching comrades - I'm amazed they have any teachers left in the UK given the pay and conditions and really variable quality of leadership, which tends to skew towards the bad.

Where I'm working now has issues but at least I can say the kids are all pretty nice and the behaviour is usual teenager stuff. When I worked in the UK we had students trying to batter down the doors of staffrooms to beat up a teacher and stuff like that. Absolutely mad. It made me really interested in what had happened in the UK to cause the collapse of the social fabric to that extent, because I'd been teaching in an inner city school in Dublin before that with a lot of heroin and gang issues, and the behaviour in my middle class academy in Essex was genuinely worse than what I'd experienced there.

So impressed with the professionalism of my English colleagues from that time, I learned a lot from them and I think you have to be pretty good just to survive in that system. Made me laugh when they were talking about increasing the maths instruction - I broadly agree with the policy, but where did they think they were going to summon all the extra maths teachers to do it from? Obviously out of touch.

The education system here is unfortunately designed to maintain the status quo. Subjects don't equip students with the skills or knowledge needed to make meaningful changes, and teachers are made so focused on exam performance that we don't have the confidence or time to teach those skills off of our own volition. England is a monarchy pretending to be a democracy, and the education system is deliberately left to rot to maintain that illusion.

 JamesY wrote:
The education system here is unfortunately designed to maintain the status quo. Subjects don't equip students with the skills or knowledge needed to make meaningful changes, and teachers are made so focused on exam performance that we don't have the confidence or time to teach those skills off of our own volition. England is a monarchy pretending to be a democracy, and the education system is deliberately left to rot to maintain that illusion.

Er... yes? The history of public education is interesting, but the primary remit is teaching socialization and national identity, not innovation. Just getting the basics of literacy and mathematics is a bonus.

 Jadenim wrote:
I’m getting thoroughly sick of senior “leaders” and their “visions”. They come in, ignore the frontline problems that are causing us day-to-day pain in favour of enacting their “strategic vision”, get 18-months in and then bugger off to a shinier looking job somewhere else. Meanwhile their “vision” gets abandoned before it ever gets implemented and replaced by the next person’s “vision” and we’re still dealing with the same gak down in the trenches.

Legit. My direct manager just quit a month ago and pretty much everyone in my team and even outside my program thought that I was a shoo-in for taking over for her since I was already basically a manager all but in name since I covered so much of the everyday operations between the different parts of my team. Unfortunately, my director basically didn't even approve my attempt to apply for the role, saying that the position was "senior" so I wouldn't be able to qualify even though I was already doing 90% of the job and I had all the program knowledge. We still don't have a manager right now and I'm running things as if I was manager and I'm currently looking for other jobs at the moment but it's a bit tough since I had already booked a trip to Japan in March and currently most places have frozen hiring before the Christmas season, and there's enough work I have to cover currently that it's hard to find time to apply and network for jobs. My director is waxing lyrical about what his ambitions are for the program in our next call for proposal but frankly, with how little he seems to understand some of the frontline staff are struggling in their roles (we've had a crazy amount of turnover in the past year), it feels very hollow and out of touch when it seems we can barely keep things running with our current team as is without adding further things to the program.

Voss wrote:

 JamesY wrote:
The education system here is unfortunately designed to maintain the status quo. Subjects don't equip students with the skills or knowledge needed to make meaningful changes, and teachers are made so focused on exam performance that we don't have the confidence or time to teach those skills off of our own volition. England is a monarchy pretending to be a democracy, and the education system is deliberately left to rot to maintain that illusion.

Er... yes? The history of public education is interesting, but the primary remit is teaching socialization and national identity, not innovation. Just getting the basics of literacy and mathematics is a bonus.

It isn't even doing that, any more, and the sector is very different to what it was only 4 years ago. Many of the students leaving UK schools at present will be in no way socialised to function well as adults, or in a manner that will allow them to have a positive future in the work place. Where once we were essentially preparing them for 9-5 work for 40 years, a significant proportion are leaving school with a mindset that will make employment for them impossible.

 Grimskul wrote:

 Jadenim wrote:
I’m getting thoroughly sick of senior “leaders” and their “visions”. They come in, ignore the frontline problems that are causing us day-to-day pain in favour of enacting their “strategic vision”, get 18-months in and then bugger off to a shinier looking job somewhere else. Meanwhile their “vision” gets abandoned before it ever gets implemented and replaced by the next person’s “vision” and we’re still dealing with the same gak down in the trenches.

Legit. My direct manager just quit a month ago and pretty much everyone in my team and even outside my program thought that I was a shoo-in for taking over for her since I was already basically a manager all but in name since I covered so much of the everyday operations between the different parts of my team. Unfortunately, my director basically didn't even approve my attempt to apply for the role, saying that the position was "senior" so I wouldn't be able to qualify even though I was already doing 90% of the job and I had all the program knowledge. We still don't have a manager right now and I'm running things as if I was manager and I'm currently looking for other jobs at the moment but it's a bit tough since I had already booked a trip to Japan in March and currently most places have frozen hiring before the Christmas season, and there's enough work I have to cover currently that it's hard to find time to apply and network for jobs. My director is waxing lyrical about what his ambitions are for the program in our next call for proposal but frankly, with how little he seems to understand some of the frontline staff are struggling in their roles (we've had a crazy amount of turnover in the past year), it feels very hollow and out of touch when it seems we can barely keep things running with our current team as is without adding further things to the program.

Heh, your situation isn't too dissimilar from mine, the guy who screwed up my promotion and isn't fixing the issues he's created in my department is also an out of touch director w lofty ambition.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Snip

To me it seems that you have successfully run into the 4 personalities that are often visible in state and or close to state companies. Mostly in combinations, mostly harmless or even surprisingly usefull, often also dangerous.

The lazy, incompetent, ambitious ( to the point of pathology) and idealists. And it seems that you are confronted by the incompetent-ambitious which are the most problematic people in any such system.

So basically General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's classification system?

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

Also sometimes translated as:

I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

It can be really hard when a "patron" leaves the organization. Typically, they leave because their influence is gone or spent. Therefore, anyone they were a patron of is immediately on the outs too. It is best to cut bait and get out of dodge.

This can be really hard to do, because you have invested so much effort and time. You perceived yourself to be a rising star, and you were.

However, that old regime is gone and those that have replaced it will want nothing to do with the old one. You pretty much get black-balled so investing new time and energy into changing perceptions is very difficult. So difficult in fact that it is best to start fresh someplace else.

I'm probably a bit weird but I never really wanted a promotion in my work. I don't think I'd be a very good manager of colleagues, and I'm not a big fan of emails either.

So it's interesting to watch "from the bottom" how all this politics plays out. I'd say Easy E, you're right, and I've seen this sort of thing play out as chaos0xomega has described too. I think that the mistake we often make is thinking those who're "above" (yuck) us have the same goals as us, or care about the outcomes we care about.

But they often don't. People who push ambitiously are often pretty selfish, and the outcomes they care about are self centred ones rather than ones that are good for the organisation. Like I've seen that situation where an obviously bad candidate gets promoted over a much better choice a bunch of times, and I think it's partially because the leadership structure was a bit unstable, and they didn't want anyone competent showing them up and wanted someone a bit weak who they could control, who would rely on them for patronage, rather than building up their own power base.

If that impacts the rest of the workers, or the students in my case (school), who cares? That's secondary to securing power and making sure there are no threats to it. Problems can always be pinned on someone lower down.

It's hard not to grow contemptuous when you see this over and over, but those few managers you get who actually understand the job and do it properly can have such a massive positive impact, and they are so valuable. It's a shame that it seems like a lot of organisations don't really value that or reward it.

(For myself, I think a lot of the problem is creating hierarchy where there doesn't need to be one - teaching is full of assistant head type roles that are not really needed but act as steps on the ladder and goodies to hand out to favourites. I think we'd mostly be better off without all that - make schools a bit smaller, have a head, deputy head and secretary and everyone else is just a teacher. Give out extra responsibilities for specific tasks as needed but no need for fancy titles and crap.)

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Grimskul wrote:

 Jadenim wrote:
I’m getting thoroughly sick of senior “leaders” and their “visions”. They come in, ignore the frontline problems that are causing us day-to-day pain in favour of enacting their “strategic vision”, get 18-months in and then bugger off to a shinier looking job somewhere else. Meanwhile their “vision” gets abandoned before it ever gets implemented and replaced by the next person’s “vision” and we’re still dealing with the same gak down in the trenches.

Legit. My direct manager just quit a month ago and pretty much everyone in my team and even outside my program thought that I was a shoo-in for taking over for her since I was already basically a manager all but in name since I covered so much of the everyday operations between the different parts of my team. Unfortunately, my director basically didn't even approve my attempt to apply for the role, saying that the position was "senior" so I wouldn't be able to qualify even though I was already doing 90% of the job and I had all the program knowledge. We still don't have a manager right now and I'm running things as if I was manager and I'm currently looking for other jobs at the moment but it's a bit tough since I had already booked a trip to Japan in March and currently most places have frozen hiring before the Christmas season, and there's enough work I have to cover currently that it's hard to find time to apply and network for jobs. My director is waxing lyrical about what his ambitions are for the program in our next call for proposal but frankly, with how little he seems to understand some of the frontline staff are struggling in their roles (we've had a crazy amount of turnover in the past year), it feels very hollow and out of touch when it seems we can barely keep things running with our current team as is without adding further things to the program.

Heh, your situation isn't too dissimilar from mine, the guy who screwed up my promotion and isn't fixing the issues he's created in my department is also an out of touch director w lofty ambition.

Yeah, your story was a lot more in-depth than mine (and obviously on a much larger scale since you're in a significantly bigger industry and in much higher management) but your post really resonated with me and I feel for you man, it's really rough when incompetency seems rewarded rather than punished, and the inertia of bad decisions seems almost impossible to overcome. Fingers crossed you get a new position where you don't feel like you've been dragged across the coals, it's rough when you're underappreciated and overworked. Based on what I see from your story, you definitely have a good source of references for when you apply for jobs outside your current organization and you clearly have the skills to back it up, so it's just a matter of networking and hoping the openings are there for you to take it.

chaos0xomega wrote:
So basically General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's classification system?

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

Also sometimes translated as:

I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

In essence but not on outlook and a bit more indepth. I tend to blend these personalities with intelligence aswell as their mainline motivator.

F.e. a lazy official is honestly a good official as long as he does what he is told to. Sure economically he isn't efficent as it should be, otoh he is also not likely to use the sledgehammer that is the state in a way that is devastating, far too lazy to do so, can however rationalise parts of the state if he is also intelligent enough so that his lazyness is a net gain.

The incompetent are a class in and of themselves, basically the private economy would've rationalised them away. combined with lazy they are annoying, but can be reigned in.

The ambitious come in 2 colours, the incompetent ones often tied to nepotism and the idealists often tied to ideology. The later is devastating for a whole slew of reasons but he can be reigned in through his amibition. The former is basically a lickspittle to what follows.

The idealists that are ambitious. Those often trend torwards competent but being sourounded by a core of the ambitious incompetent ones. This is the archetype of the power-tripp-monster and makes career in more authoritharian and centralised systems. Basically avoid at all costs these in any type of state structure, contrary i regard it as a duty of any sane political system to remove them for the danger they represent.
Sadly that lesson is refused to be learnt by a lot of politicians, to their own detriment because it enforces an ideological bureucracy on the elected politicians which is atleast partially responisble for the lack of actual reform you can wittness in certain western states. And if the foundation of the system is authoritharian well, you get in essence a russian type cleptocracy of apparatchicks.

The reality is that a lot of decisions are made to cover up earlier decisions, because the big boss needs to save face. And in most work cultures, taking a step back is seen as a big hit, so we tend to let people stay in roles they aren't suited for (the peter principle).

Unfortunately, it can take quite a while to ride out a bad manager. The best bet is almost always to find another job.

Plus, it is often the most profitable step.

Most companies will not reward you for tenure. Therefore, some pros think if you are not switching roles every 2-3 years you are actually falling behind the pay curve due to raises that are often flat or less than inflation. By switching jobs you are "jumping" up higher than the usual annual raise.

Thats certainly the plan for me, look elsewhere and chase a better paycheck and better opportunity.

I just got out of the 1:1 with my director, it went... well? For the first time in a year hes communicated to me where he kind of sees things going for me and the opportunity that he hopes he can carve out for me in a few months time. I'm not sure its 100% aligned with my goals or will pay me what I might get elsewhere, but its more than what I had before, sadly might be a little too little a little too late to keep me from going. Truth is on a personal level I really do enjoy working with and interacting with him, I just can't put up with the mismanagement I've suffered under him.

More importantly though is he's taking the situation with the head of security pretty seriously and is concerned (as well as surprised) by that turn of events. Hes going to take the issue up with higher echelons of HR apparently to try to figure out how best to handle it, as he doesn't trust local HR to do anything right (and referred to them as "incestuous" which tells me hes had other issues that werent addressed).

Ah, yeah, like i said, core of em and the working climate goes to commit sudoku.

I just found out that I'm going to gross $150,000 this year.



I will reiterate that I absolutely love my job, and I'm finally being rewarded for it.

Not too shabby!

Whilst I can’t pretend I make anywhere near that, I remain thankful I am at least on a perfectly comfortable income, which covers a good deal more than my bare necessities.

Plus, I can now make custom mugs (for tea and coffee and that), so once I’ve figured out how best to advertise, I can have a nice extra income. Which will first be put toward paying down debts, then go into a separate savings pot for Very Nice Things, like perhaps another trip to New York!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Not too shabby!

Whilst I can’t pretend I make anywhere near that, I remain thankful I am at least on a perfectly comfortable income, which covers a good deal more than my bare necessities.

Plus, I can now make custom mugs (for tea and coffee and that), so once I’ve figured out how best to advertise, I can have a nice extra income. Which will first be put toward paying down debts, then go into a separate savings pot for Very Nice Things, like perhaps another trip to New York!

Bear in mind that it took a raise, copious amounts of overtime, and some upgraded bonuses, and having two with special needs gobbles a bit of that up. I can't complain, though, as I find myself loving the work far more than I ever thought I would.