4 ms·

I've never actually been forgotten, but I've definitely spent months unutilized. Once was as a consultant through a third party. Job was a 1 year contract to he

I've never actually been forgotten, but I've definitely spent months unutilized. Once was as a consultant through a third party. Job was a 1 year contract to help implement some APIs. they had enough work planned for about one month, then nothing for a loooong time. I worked on some load testing busy work sporadically during this period. It was the type of situation where the on site manger knew he didn't have anything for me, so we just sort of mutually agreed to not discuss it. I was offered to convert to full time by the same manager. I said "Seriously? I haven't done sh-- here?" He replied yeah but I contributed more than a lot of the others. I declined as I had another job lined up already. But I was stunned, still am when I reflect on it.

fyfy18 8y ago
If you can afford it, it’s a lot better to have too many people (although your case sounds a bit extreme) than too little. I’m working at a startup where we have too little, and we are rushing to get stuff done without really thinking it through long term. Our tech debt level is growing each day. In your case it sounds like you - and your experience - really helped other members of the team work more efficiently.
- xab9 8y ago
  I value myself more than to sit around for months so that the company may feel secure. I usually start looking for a new job after a month, since I'm not needed here and I'm bored (I also can't talk about this with the manager, or at least whenever I tried nothing fruitful came out of it; doing opensource or just reading tutorials were usually dismissed - the best managers can come up with in these situations is that you "document everything").
- toast0 8y ago
  Having too little people isn't too bad, in my experience. There's a lot of things you could do, that you won't be able to do, but nobody will have hurt feelings when you don't do their thing when you don't have enough people to do it. If you've got too many people and you're still pushing back on features, you're going to have a lot more hurt feelings. Plus, at least in my experience, if you know you're not going to have time to redo something, you do it right the first time :)
- kd5bjo 8y ago
  This is where a retainer agreement can come in handy. The company is explicitly paying you to keep time free in case they need the extra workforce, but you aren't expected to even show up unless there's work to do.
pwaai 8y ago
hahaha, that is similar to my case except I was a full time employee that was hired from what I can see a sporadic last ditched sales campaign. it was a weird experience, culturally too. like there's only ~100 ppl yet you have so many middle level managers that just seems to parse email contents from customers or phone calls and applying some generic risk reward decisions based on some cliche-immigrant-to-riches story of some giant American corporation. Large glassroom conferences very similar to the one from The Social Network....a manager that loves to use the whiteboard any chance they can get to show off their flowchart or maybe more in the vicinity of "adding value when the ceo walks in". One time a visitor pointed out why the person sitting across from me didn't know my name, which panickly corrected by saying oh we are a large company....100 ppl and you can never even make eye contact or even say hi...what in the fuck this is starting to digress into a similar style from the submission article but I really like his usage of smaller sentences to really bring home the edge of your sit moments....also I see ppl are upvoting which I will automatically take as a positive feedback to continue. so I was at this job was kickin ass an engineer then I realize the whole product and 1 hour sales cycle that we used to torture naive prospects and saavy ceo's who figured out how to get months of free consulting by dangling a carrot - 14% commission on a 400k quota. One sale would mean another quarter to prove you don't suck at sales. So not much demand but really enthusiastic c-suites keen on jumping on 1 hour calls to squeeze every value they can. This meant the entirety of the company strategy was to focus on very large accounts which ultimately resulted in disaster as you can see. I learned that each sales process is a lot like buying OTM options. The payout is truly great but most of them turn out to be worthless. A bit like European options in that you can't exercise before or after the expiry date. I mean they are the same thing at the core, they are both contracts between parties. Except the company paying you can cancel anytime if you didn't put it in the clause. Well there goes our annual revenue target. Portfolio risk increases when you are too biased...the tragedy in this case being the unwillingness from the executives to accept cold hard facts not incomplete information....when you get angry or use fear to motivate your subordinates, basically creating a negative feedback loop, you increase opacity of information which in turn fuels decentralization making it harder and more costlier to acquire trivial data because people like to not hide but discouraged from putting it in directly infront of someone who gets angry when results are not met. This is the definition of a petulant child. put all the bags in one basket, or one large account, everything slows down. The whole sales revenue target for the quarter depends on this account. Literally make it or break it type of situation that repeatedly gets sold by the executives as a 100% deal. In fact I can't count how many times I heard that a deal was literally waiting to be signed only to discover how far away from what was actually announced company wide. So basically tl;dr, focusing on large enterprise account created a lot of unutilized time, not just me but I personally saw an account executive have a nervous breakdown. You truly have to be strong inside to do enterprise sales I feel. Even tougher when your AE is sitting across you berating developers as [derogatory word] he feels is conspiring against him. In one incident he used a very degrading picture of a gay effeminate Asian male that he "randomly" found while searching for an appropriate image that fit his company wide show & tell on "analytical trends". Also more uncomfortable is that they would sit an Asian co-worker in the same room and ask who the fuck gave 0 for diversity amongst the Caucasian workers. Literally felt like standing before a Soviet military tribunal before permanently being shipped to Vladivostok gulags found in 80s Soviet Pioneer songs. " Рыба c головы тухнет, Игорь ! " Absolutely abhorrent conduct by the HR but the fish rots from head down as they say over in Rossiya. But probably the most fucked up shit is being called a derogatory reference by an AE and being ditched on the way to a company party, btw a deal that I quickly pointed out as being very risky due to the engineering miracles that were being promised. Truly fucked up and you can see given the conduct one has to make a call. "Make 100k browsing reddit 9-5 with no supervisor in a toxic and failing B2B startup that is over a decade old in a highly 420 friendly office culture" vs "employment insurance". I didn't have to choose because they were not mutually exclusive. but here was a sure way to stop possibly the highest dollar to output of cash printing quantum machine (you have to show up once in a while to let them know you exist). So yeah I don't feel bad about being underutilized, it was the boredom I had to save myself from and what was a toxic environment under the veil of a highly reputable articles and "fake it till you make it" culture.
raducu 8y ago
I've been doing contract work for the past 3 years and I've learnt to avoid such situations like the plague. At my last job I ran into the situation where I completed a project but my manager was lazy about asking for the next project. I don't like disturbing people so I only asked about the new project 3-4 times during a week and my manager always told me to have patience. At the end of that week she actually had a 2 week vacation planned so I ended up not doing any meaningfull work for 3 weeks. My manager had to sign my bill with detalied work. It just sucked making up "work" for 21 days and then billing for it but my manager signed off the work; 3 months later when the project rand into some delays my manager arranged a meeting where se stated that she feelt the project was running late because of my slacking off. Anyway, I'd never do that again -- I'd just email the manager about not having any work and clearly bill my time as "waiting for work".

fyfy18 8y ago

If you can afford it, it’s a lot better to have too many people (although your case sounds a bit extreme) than too little. I’m working at a startup where we have too little, and we are rushing to get stuff done without really thinking it through long term. Our tech debt level is growing each day. In your case it sounds like you - and your experience - really helped other members of the team work more efficiently.

xab9 8y ago
I value myself more than to sit around for months so that the company may feel secure. I usually start looking for a new job after a month, since I'm not needed here and I'm bored (I also can't talk about this with the manager, or at least whenever I tried nothing fruitful came out of it; doing opensource or just reading tutorials were usually dismissed - the best managers can come up with in these situations is that you "document everything").
toast0 8y ago
Having too little people isn't too bad, in my experience. There's a lot of things you could do, that you won't be able to do, but nobody will have hurt feelings when you don't do their thing when you don't have enough people to do it. If you've got too many people and you're still pushing back on features, you're going to have a lot more hurt feelings. Plus, at least in my experience, if you know you're not going to have time to redo something, you do it right the first time :)
kd5bjo 8y ago
This is where a retainer agreement can come in handy. The company is explicitly paying you to keep time free in case they need the extra workforce, but you aren't expected to even show up unless there's work to do.

pwaai 8y ago

hahaha, that is similar to my case except I was a full time employee that was hired from what I can see a sporadic last ditched sales campaign. it was a weird experience, culturally too. like there's only ~100 ppl yet you have so many middle level managers that just seems to parse email contents from customers or phone calls and applying some generic risk reward decisions based on some cliche-immigrant-to-riches story of some giant American corporation. Large glassroom conferences very similar to the one from The Social Network....a manager that loves to use the whiteboard any chance they can get to show off their flowchart or maybe more in the vicinity of "adding value when the ceo walks in". One time a visitor pointed out why the person sitting across from me didn't know my name, which panickly corrected by saying oh we are a large company....100 ppl and you can never even make eye contact or even say hi...what in the fuck this is starting to digress into a similar style from the submission article but I really like his usage of smaller sentences to really bring home the edge of your sit moments....also I see ppl are upvoting which I will automatically take as a positive feedback to continue. so I was at this job was kickin ass an engineer then I realize the whole product and 1 hour sales cycle that we used to torture naive prospects and saavy ceo's who figured out how to get months of free consulting by dangling a carrot - 14% commission on a 400k quota. One sale would mean another quarter to prove you don't suck at sales. So not much demand but really enthusiastic c-suites keen on jumping on 1 hour calls to squeeze every value they can. This meant the entirety of the company strategy was to focus on very large accounts which ultimately resulted in disaster as you can see. I learned that each sales process is a lot like buying OTM options. The payout is truly great but most of them turn out to be worthless. A bit like European options in that you can't exercise before or after the expiry date. I mean they are the same thing at the core, they are both contracts between parties. Except the company paying you can cancel anytime if you didn't put it in the clause. Well there goes our annual revenue target. Portfolio risk increases when you are too biased...the tragedy in this case being the unwillingness from the executives to accept cold hard facts not incomplete information....when you get angry or use fear to motivate your subordinates, basically creating a negative feedback loop, you increase opacity of information which in turn fuels decentralization making it harder and more costlier to acquire trivial data because people like to not hide but discouraged from putting it in directly infront of someone who gets angry when results are not met. This is the definition of a petulant child. put all the bags in one basket, or one large account, everything slows down. The whole sales revenue target for the quarter depends on this account. Literally make it or break it type of situation that repeatedly gets sold by the executives as a 100% deal. In fact I can't count how many times I heard that a deal was literally waiting to be signed only to discover how far away from what was actually announced company wide. So basically tl;dr, focusing on large enterprise account created a lot of unutilized time, not just me but I personally saw an account executive have a nervous breakdown. You truly have to be strong inside to do enterprise sales I feel. Even tougher when your AE is sitting across you berating developers as [derogatory word] he feels is conspiring against him. In one incident he used a very degrading picture of a gay effeminate Asian male that he "randomly" found while searching for an appropriate image that fit his company wide show & tell on "analytical trends". Also more uncomfortable is that they would sit an Asian co-worker in the same room and ask who the fuck gave 0 for diversity amongst the Caucasian workers. Literally felt like standing before a Soviet military tribunal before permanently being shipped to Vladivostok gulags found in 80s Soviet Pioneer songs. " Рыба c головы тухнет, Игорь ! " Absolutely abhorrent conduct by the HR but the fish rots from head down as they say over in Rossiya. But probably the most fucked up shit is being called a derogatory reference by an AE and being ditched on the way to a company party, btw a deal that I quickly pointed out as being very risky due to the engineering miracles that were being promised. Truly fucked up and you can see given the conduct one has to make a call. "Make 100k browsing reddit 9-5 with no supervisor in a toxic and failing B2B startup that is over a decade old in a highly 420 friendly office culture" vs "employment insurance". I didn't have to choose because they were not mutually exclusive. but here was a sure way to stop possibly the highest dollar to output of cash printing quantum machine (you have to show up once in a while to let them know you exist). So yeah I don't feel bad about being underutilized, it was the boredom I had to save myself from and what was a toxic environment under the veil of a highly reputable articles and "fake it till you make it" culture.

raducu 8y ago

I've been doing contract work for the past 3 years and I've learnt to avoid such situations like the plague. At my last job I ran into the situation where I completed a project but my manager was lazy about asking for the next project. I don't like disturbing people so I only asked about the new project 3-4 times during a week and my manager always told me to have patience. At the end of that week she actually had a 2 week vacation planned so I ended up not doing any meaningfull work for 3 weeks. My manager had to sign my bill with detalied work. It just sucked making up "work" for 21 days and then billing for it but my manager signed off the work; 3 months later when the project rand into some delays my manager arranged a meeting where se stated that she feelt the project was running late because of my slacking off. Anyway, I'd never do that again -- I'd just email the manager about not having any work and clearly bill my time as "waiting for work".