Does not follow...

[Weetabix]

Right now my entire department is 2 full-timers and an intern. A year ago it was 5 full-timers.
After each departure, the average quality of the groups output has improved.

I'm thinking maybe we've earned some raises this year.

I've posited that theory before. Let me know how it works out for you.

[Netpackrat]

I think I may have messed up my SDN-6 can though; going to send it back to AAC for them to look at.

After over a month with no contact, my SDN-6 showed up today. Shining a light inside, it doesn't look as though they did anything internally, so I must not have done much or any damage. They did refinish it and it's obvious the latch was replaced, which I am not necessarily thrilled about. On the one hand, with the new latch it now has tight lockup with my SBRed AK and several other rifles, it's now rattly on my 300blk SBR, which is the rifle I shoot suppressed the most. That used to be the only rifle it was tight on. Several others it is still rattly on, so I guess I gained some and lost some.

Of course that's subject to change as the latch wears. When it was new it had good lockup on some of the same mounts it is tight on now, so odds are good it will go back to the way it was. AAC and their fanbois claim that the slight looseness doesn't matter but I have found a distinct negative effect on group size.

Anyway, while I am glad they refinished my can and didn't charge me any money, I still think AAC products belong on the list of things that friends don't let friends buy, and which will give you AIDS.

[HTRN]

Right now my entire department is 2 full-timers and an intern. A year ago it was 5 full-timers.
After each departure, the average quality of the groups output has improved.

I'm thinking maybe we've earned some raises this year.

I've posited that theory before. Let me know how it works out for you.

Yeah, most employers think its the dot bubble crash where you should feel lucky to have a job.

[g-man]

I have contractors coming to extend my driveway into the back yard. Told me the city was quick and the permit is approved, which means:

A. They can start prepping Saturday morning and likely pour on Tuesday.
B. This means I need to sort out the 10’ wide vehicle/RV gate NOW, which involved setting 2 new posts in the fence line so I can move the personnel gate and add two 5’ swing gates.

Had to dig the holes and set the posts today. I did deadlifts and overhead press at the gym this morning. My hands don’t really work now. Too many irons in the fire, so I spaced on the amount of physical labor involved in fixing the gates. I could get away with that shit a decade or more ago. Now? Notsomuch.

Praise the Lord for Motrin...

[Greg]

Right now my entire department is 2 full-timers and an intern. A year ago it was 5 full-timers.
After each departure, the average quality of the groups output has improved.

I'm thinking maybe we've earned some raises this year.

I've posited that theory before. Let me know how it works out for you.

Yeah, most employers think its the dot bubble crash where you should feel lucky to have a job.

It's the retention penalty. Allow yourself to be retained, be penalized.

Too many employers don't even try to keep people, they just keep serving the same dog food and figure 'the people who leave were going to leave anyway' and also 'the people who stay would never dare leave so we only have to feed them dog food'.

I have some tentative concerns my employer thinks this way.

When this happens the only way to be treated well is to move on. Or get used to risk aversion dog food. sigh

[MarkD]

Well, if performance is high enough that raises are justified, they'll just change the performance metrics. That happened at a consulting company I used to work for, used to be our rating was based on how much of our time was spent on billable projects (in my case and many of my co-workers that was 100%) and how much our client liked us (only complaint my client had about me was he couldn't read my hand writing). So they changed the metrics, what used to be our entire review was now only 1/3, the other thirds were bringing in new business (um, don't we HAVE a sales/marketing department, which is non-billable?) and participation in company functions (usually held during work hours, when we're, you know, working at our client and making actual money for the company).

At this point in my career I don't see much point in changing jobs though. I'm in a decent situation now, working remotely from the comfort of my home, so unless something seriously turns to shit I'll stick around.

[evan price]

My job is contracted support and the customer pays to have two fse's on site 24-7.
So my company decided to make a performance metric utilization percentage and wanted 50% minimum.
Well prior to this we are considered 100% utilized because we're on site contact. But ok. So we start logging every customer interaction no matter how insignificant.
So then they say we're closing too many service tickets, to improve our service efficiency we need to reduce our calls by 40%. So we just log the serious service requests.
Then they say the average time spent per service request is too long. So we start logging the major issues as preventative maintenance tickets.
Now they say we use too many parts per preventative maintenance ticket. So we start breaking down the PM tickets into smaller PM requests.
Next they say total parts usage per ticket is still too high, they want inventory reduced 50%, and require 4 annual inventory turns. The customer pays in the contract an extra fee to guarantee 99% uptime so we're keeping a lot of expensive parts on hand like system boards that rarely fail but they do fail and there's no workaround. So we gut inventory and keep minimal parts on hand.
Then they complain because we're having to red label too many parts for breakdowns. So we have to get the customer to write specific reqs for each part in excess inventory to keep it, which the customer is annoyed at having to do every 3 months.

It never ends.

[Greg]

That sounds a lot like my last job. I was working for first EDS, then HP after the buyout, on a contract team running a managed environment for a customer. A BIG customer. THE biggest customer.

They paid us a lot of money to run that environment. Included in the contract was having 24/7 support presence onsite at each production location. So I got to work some odd hours helping to make that happen. (We were always understaffed, cheaper that way.)

But my company was *always* looking for ways to cut costs. Cheap fuckers nickel and dimed everything, even on the fucking golden goose contract (the one I was on). It was like Dilbert, the one where "if we cut costs enough we can make a profit without having to sell anything". Yeah.

Problem is, if you maximize margin by cheaping out on the service you provide, there comes a point where you are no longer providing the service the customer is *paying* for. Then they become inclined to pay less, or pay not. That part always seems to surprise the bean counters.

[randy]

That sounds a lot like my last job. I was working for first EDS, then HP after the buyout...

My job was sent to "do the needful" shorty before the HP buyout. Took me a while to catch on that the mail I was receiving from HP was actually about my EDS retirement account.

I can vouch for Greg's experience. The favored phrase for sending jobs to India was "Right Shoring". Some higher level types seemed put out when we started to refer to it as Cheap Shoring.

They lied to the customer saying they'd get the same level of tech support, but I wasn't allowed to actually train my replacements on actual trouble shooting and resolution. The wanted everything in a nice easy to follow flow chart as the folks they hired were not trained to,experienced enough, or allowed to perform actual troubleshooting and resolution beyond password resets and sending tickets to second level (something we rarely did). They really didn't comprehend that deciding to run the troubleshooting tree down the software or hardware path first was often intuition or a straight up SWAG.

Customer was NOT happy and during the transition would hang up if someone from the other place answered and call back until they got one of us and begged us not to transfer them. I was one of the last ones to be let go from team as my boss was trying to get me onto a team where I could work remotely, until they were notified their staff was being Cheap Shored.

Bitter? Nay, life in modern corporate America. Which is not to say I ain't calling them on their BS. Whatta they gonna do? Send my job to India?

[HTRN]

[quote]It's the retention penalty. Allow yourself to be retained, be penalized.

Too many employers don't even try to keep people, they just keep serving the same dog food and figure 'the people who leave were going to leave anyway' and also 'the people who stay would never dare leave so we only have to feed them dog food'.

I have some tentative concerns my employer thinks this way.

When this happens the only way to be treated well is to move on. Or get used to risk aversion dog food. sigh[/quote]

In the case of my current employer, we have employees,and then there are people like me, who are basically exempt from rules like overtime restrictìons, tardyness,etc someone once told me, they overheard the HR lady tell off a complaining employyee about me that a) i will never be fired because there is exactly two other people there who can do what i do... and one of them is the CEO.

Im also one of the fee people there that has 24hr access to the building- i can (and have) shown up there in the middle of the night to make parts. Ive never even gotten questioned after doing this.

I just wish the goddamn commute didnt suck so bad, and i actually had parking