Category: Job Jollies

When listening to music on your computer at the office, it is only polite to use headphones, lest you irk your officemates with your odd sense of tuneage.

When using headphones, it is only wise to check to see if the things are actually plugged in, lest you think that nobody else can hear your odd sense of tuneage and, in reality, it’s blaring loudly enough from your computer speakers to be heard past your earphones (and, thus, outward to the office beyond).

An empirically-derived word to the wise …

Okay, so one of the things that a manager gets to do is perform annual performance and salary reviews. It’s a process I hate with a passion, but it’s one that I’m at least familiar with, having done it for some years.

Well, today I found out that I get to do it for one of my overseas employees. Who is associated with a different subsidiary company, so they have a completely different process, do it on a fixed date each year, and probably have a zillion different other land mines just waiting for me to step on.

Joy.

To be continued …

Hill’s Law of Software Evaluation: If it ain’t invented here, it’s no good.

Hill’s Political Corollary: If it was invented over there, then it’s definitely no good.

Hill’s Self-Reflective Blind Spot Corollary: Can you believe how close-minded they are over there about what we invented here?

As someone who has read way too many badly-written resumes and cover letters, the best advice I can give to anyone on the subject is read this. Truth.

It starts with:

A résumé is a way to get to the next stage: the interview. Companies often get dozens of résumés for every opening … we get between 100 and 200 per opening. There is no possible way we can interview that many people. The only hope is if we can screen people out using résumés. Don’t think of a résumé as a way to get a job: think of it as a way to give some hiring manager an excuse to hit DELETE. At least technically, your résumé has to be perfect to survive.

Indeed. I never hired someone just because they had perfect spelling and punctuation in their cover letter, and had a well-organized and aestheticaly pleasing résumé attached. But I have certainly tossed out applications with spelling and grammar errors in the cover letter and poorly-organized and ugly résumés. If you can’t get communicate clearly and well when you have all the time in the world to write up something, how will you possibly do it in the middle of an overtime crisis?

Read the whole thing.

(via BoingBoing)

So I finally got my long-delayed business trip up to Sacramento (woo-woo) scheduled, and started to write an e-mail to my people up there to let them know. I tend to be free-associative with subject lines, so I was about to call it “Sacramento, ho!” when it occurred to me …

… between evolution in vocabulary, and the fact that neither of my employees up there are likely to be old US Western movie fans …

… they would probably be at best confused, at worse considering filing sexual harrassment suits.

*Sigh*

So, how do you tell your boss you feel like an idiot?

Just wondering.

While setting up appointments for phone calls in Outlook is a truly fine idea, and it’s great to go to all the detail of identifying a good time in the calendar, noting the names and purpose of the call in the “Subject” field, entering the phone number to be dialed in the “Where” field, choosing the correct background color for the appointment to be like your other phonecons, defining the recurrence of the call on the particular screen for that, and all that swell stuff …

… it’s probably just as important to actually invite the call participants. At least, I suspect you get a better response that way …

I’m just saying …

As noted, I’m in another Southland office, one that’s only 30 minutes away by fairly clear freeways, instead of 2 hours away through Foothill Hell. I’m in a cube this time out, though. Being normally in an office has utterly spoiled me, especially since this is a very quiet floor, meaning any phone conversations are audible over an alarming range (fortunately, the front door is nearby, so I can go outside).

On the other hand, someone conveniently left a Palm cradle here, so I can recharge mine.

And there’s a Carl’s Junior within walking distance …

My boss is quite a bit like me, at least as far as being a functioning introvert. It shows up most in the ends of conversations — they seem abrupt, hurried, drop-what-you’re-doing-and-get-out-of-Dodge.

So I’ve been a bit worried because I don’t get a lot of feedback from him on how things are going. Am I doing the things he wants? Am I doing things he doesn’t want? Am I not doing the things he wants. Am I not doing the things he doesn’t want?

Yes, I do really think about this stuff.

And when requests for info or approval seem terse, or conversations suddenly are cut off, it can feel uncertain whether you’re being dropped quickly and distastefully, or if it’s simply the person’s style.

The latter, it seems, in this case. I took advantage of face time with him today to ping him as to how things were going, and he gave me a fairly glowing oral review — e-mails could be a bit shorter, disappointed about progress on one project (which he then took responsibility for), but overall very good.

So, that makes me feel good, too. Huzzah.

When e-mailing someone something to read before it is forwarded on to the customer who is requesting it, be sure to use as formal a subject line and tone as you plan to send on to the recipient, since you never can tell if you’ll be absent-mindedly rushed for time upon arriving at the office and just forward the whole kit-and-caboodle on without doing a planned vetting before doing so.

This is particularly important if you choose a subject line like “Review this dumb proposal for Bill” or “Here’s some revenue we can scrape from Joe’s department.” While the review recipient may find this amusing, and even informative, inadvertently forwarding the subject line on to Bill or Joe might not engender such affection.

This has been your business etiquette tip for the day.

Two major projects (and a host of little ones) dragged me out into the middle of the street and hit me with cement blocks today, while my boss looked on with disappointment that I hadn’t dealt with them already. (A disappointment that is not, to be sure, without some justification, in the case of one of them.)

So, nothing up here this morning, whilst I desperately bang out e-mail and make phone calls and other good stuff. I’m posting only long enough to let you know I’m still alive, before I shut my system down, eat some lunch, and meet with Margie for the afternoon. No idea when I’ll be back on, so have a happy Friday and we’ll catch you tomorrow.

Hmmm. This doesn’t bode well.

From an employee and management perspective, the cost increases for our program cannot continue. Insurance programs are there to help us when we really need them for things such as catastrophic illnesses. Our program has had many benefit changes over the years which switched the focus; some were mandated and others were a choice to expand coverage. The time has come to go back to the original focus. Management has authorized a study to review our medical program to determine a new path forward. This study will begin in January and hopefully create a new program that provides for our basic needs at a more reasonable price. We cannot keep doing what we have done for the past few years.

That’s an official employee memo from our corporate HR manager. If I read it correctly, it sounds like the already-narrow coverage we have through the company will be getting still more narrow (catastrophic coverage only, perhaps, with high deductables/co-pays).

The memo does note how costs have been increasing for company coverage of insurance (around 60% of the cost, with costs increasing 18%/year, and the company plowing in an amount almost half of our annual margin to make up for higher-than-expected costs this year).

We’ve personally managed to duck this bullet for a while, getting coverage through Margie’s very generous benefits (and, as I’ve said before, for all that my salary is more than hers, if one of us had to quit to stay at home, I’m not sure it would make most sense for it to be Margie). But it’s obviously a large and growing and ongoing problem.

And, as much as I wish the government could wave its hands and make it all go away, I’m not sure I’ve seen a plan that doesn’t simply shift cost increases up the food chain, and turn “you have to pay higher premiums and do with lower service” from private insurance into “you have to pay higher taxes and do with lower service” from the government.

Hrm.

Woo-hoo! Walked in today with 22 due or overdue Task List items, and am leavnig with only 7. Wow.

Of course, some of them simply got arbitrarily pushed back, but that does make me feel like I got something accomplished today.

Hill’s Law of the Workplace: If you’re going to make friends with anyone in the workplace, make friends with HR, Payroll, the Office Manager, and IT.

The reason being, of course, that they are all in key positions to make your life so much easier, or to make your life a living hell.

About a week ago, the Powers That Be here in this office decided to adopt an office-wide screen saver. The one they chose has actually been floating around since ’97 or so in the company, and there have been occasional efforts by the office that generated it to roll it out company-wide. It’s designed to flash up information of interest to the workplace — company stock prices, safety bulletins, meeting notices, stuff like that.

There’s one, big, honking problem with this, of course: you’ll only ever see it when your machine is sitting idle for ten minutes. Which, for many of us, is, like, never. Or, if it’s true, it’s because we’re out of our chairs and in a meeting, or at lunch, and as soon as we sit down we start in at the keyboard again.

In other words, if you can see the screen saver, you’re not working very hard. That’s an exaggeration, and there are, in fact, folks who don’t use their computers as intensely as I do. But the general principle applies.

And, in fact, the folks who aren’t working on their computer probably aren’t reading the screen saver blurbs that come up. Right? If they are, yeah, they probably aren’t working very hard.

It’s also not good for getting info quickly. The office manager asked that a bulletin be put up there with a number to call if people see suspicious characters out in the parking lot. Think of that. My God, there’s someone suspicious out in the parking lot. Should I call 911? Should I call the front desk? Should I look on our office intranet page and find the building management number? Nah, I’ll sit here at my computer and not do anything for ten minutes, then wait for the bulletin to come up, then call that number.

Next up, what to do in case of fire …

The fact is, we’ve eleventy-dozen ways of communicating information. E-mail. Intranet pages. Memos stuffed in mailboxes. The PA system. Not only is another medium probably not necessary, but choosing one that half the folks will never see, and that everyone else will ignore, and that requires consistent and ponderous viewing to get through.

On top of that, it’s a POS application (and I’m not talking Point of Sale here). It was written for Win95, and hasn’t been updated since. It requires a half dozen reghacks to install on XP and Win2K machines (and to block people from going in and changing the stuff back).

And it requires access to a local Netware server. We’re phasing Netware out in our enterprise. And if you’re not connected to the interior network, it just comes up with the program logo and says, plaintively, “I can’t find the Internet.” Even if the Internet is right there, connected and buzzing.

And because it’s tied clumsily into the Netware client to control workstation locking, not only does it not work at all for machines without a Netware client, but it takes 10 seconds to go from mouse-wiggle to login-prompt when you want to break away from it, and more like 30 if you’re not connected to a Netware server at the time.

Harrumph. And, feh.

So this morning I was passing by one of our server ops guys, and he said hi, and we chatted for a few moments, and I asked whether anyone had been having problems with the screen saver. And he started to tell me about it, then mentioned someone for whom he’d disabled it, then, before I could figure out a legitimate way to ask, he offered to do the same for me.

[Insert maniacal laughter here.]

So back comes my beloved SETI@Home screen saver, and farewell to that ragged bit of bad code. Yup, being friends with IT is always a good idea …

Got my annual review. Well, actually, haven’t gotten the review, but got the raise notice. A month late, to be sure, but my New New Boss had to wait on the Old New Boss for input.

On the other hand, it was above the rather draconian “standard” cap we have on us this year, so I’ve got no complaints.

Folks in my company who work overseas are usually more sensitive to time zone differences and the like than domestic US staff.

Which is why I’m amused that when I sent out a meeting request to everyone that said …

When: Occurs every 2 weeks on Wednesday effective Nov-12-03 from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM (GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada).

… both of my people (de facto) in the UK wrote back that 7:00 a.m. was a little early for them, and could I schedule it later? One also was confused why my time zone and theirs were only two hours apart.

Five scheduled conference calls this morning. The first four:

1. The caller did not call me.
2. Only one other person showed up, so I took notes as to what she had to say and was off the phone in 10 minutes.
3. Cancelled.
4. The person I was calling was not in, so I was able to just leave my message (since the first call this morning was going to further flesh things out) and be off in two minutes.

Huzzah!

Of course, I expect the fifth call will be the doozy. Fortunately, I have an excuse to bail out early from it.

One of the tasks I’ve taken on in my job is keeping the minutes of our weekly phonecons, which usually run for an hour or more. I type them up as people are talking, then send them off within a minute or two of the phonecon being over.

Today I got kudos on this both from my boss and from a peer manager for cranking these things out in such detail, so fast, and in such an easily reviewed format. Which was kind of neat.

I had to confess, though, it was just laziness.

I know, if I’m doing this stuff, that I have to get it sent right away. If I don’t, I’ll forget it, or it will get buried under some other window, or I’ll not recall something correctly. so I do it right then and there.

I also know that I am really awful on phone conversations, esp. ones that I’m not doing most of the talking on (and I hate talking on the phone). I get way too easily distracted — especially with a high-powered, multi-tasking, Internet-connected PC right there in front of me — if I’m just sitting there listening to people drone on and on and on … So I keep the notes, because it forces me to listen to what people are saying, and to not be doing anything else at the same time.

And I format the stuff so it’s easy to track assignments down afterwards because, well, otherwise I’d forget my assignments and never find them again.

So, you see, it’s all laziness.

Though, I suppose, as Heinlein once wrote, “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” I always try to play to my weaknesses …