All I know is if they want me to do this sort of thing even twice a year I need to be earning (via whatever means) double what I'm currently on.
All I know is if they want me to do this sort of thing even twice a year I need to be earning (via whatever means) double what I'm currently on.
You should be interviewing a couple of times a year for other roles just to test the water. This place seems horrifically backwards on literally every measure
Yeah, that’s the advice our VP of HR told us on day 1.
I’ve never really done it, but applying for other jobs and getting internal interviews kicked the firestorm in the same way.
What sort of job do you fancy Jim? Or is this it, and they just need to pay you more?
Definitely. I’m not doing it currently because they’re upping my pay annually by a satisfactory amount and I can be at home every night which is a luxury in my industry. When that ends in a few years I’ll certainly be back to shopping around.
At least Jim doesn’t hate his job. Nothing worse than the thing you have to do everyday grinding you down and making you miserable.
The contrast in my job satisfaction between now and 5 years ago is phenomenal.
I'm a twit
We hired a new developer 2 weeks ago, and he's absolutely hopeless. I really need to change how we interview and assess candidates because there's no way this idiot should've been hired.
Another brutal firing by SvN
What’s he managed to do in 2 weeks to earn such a scathing review of internal SvN inc. policies?
I imagine it's the usual 'tell me about a time when you had to do x' stuff that is useless for determining someone's suitability for a skilled post, but is the blagger's dream ticket. Our lot have been caught out by that before.
I like this but they do need to pay me or it won't be worth the hassle going forward.
Just done a 6 hour flight from Santiago to Bogota, operated on Easyjet terms i.e. they don't give you even water or a coffee or let you recline the seat. Avianca honestly the shittest airline in the world, so it's lucky I now have another 10 hour flight with them back to London taking off in a couple of hours.
It's international women's Day and the state of Berlin celebrate. Thanks for the day off.
It's just the quality of his work. We've given him a really basic internal project to get started with, that hits on a few different areas (managing performance, third party API integration, database design) that make up a big part of the job. The plan was to let him do it, review and then show him what would need to change to align to our standards/practices. The problem is a 1-2 day project has taken 2 weeks (so far) and our Lead Developer's feedback yesterday was that it was just a massive shitshow.
Some of his choices are baffling even to me, who hasn't developed anything for about 5 years and was poor at best when I did.
An introductory 30 minute chat where we ask about their experience, technical skills, etc. Then a second interview where they prepare a technical walkthrough of a project they've worked on, where they can explain their technical decisions, we can ask questions, and generally get a feel for how competent they are. We prefer this approach over some sort of task because it means we see their approach to larger projects in terms of architecture, etc.
Are you getting people to show you their code from previous jobs? Or are you expecting them all to have hobby projects too?
The candidates we interviewed either showed freelance projects or redacted code from previous jobs.
Redacting code from most likely your current job (you're probably not going to remember or still have access to code from jobs before that) sounds like more hassle than just doing some sort of coding test.
What did this guy show in his interview?
Some sort of custom CRM he'd developed for his last contracting position. It was fine, but was basically a CRUD app with some simple PDF generation and automated emails. But there wasn't anything wrong with it, and so I decided to give him a shot.
We will be changing our strategy for future interviews.
Can Boyd have a job?
My work has just hit the "restructure" klaxon.
We have had two minor re-structures in the last twelve months, and every issue that was obvious to us but apparently not the people making it happen has come to pass. The lol thing is the latter group aren't some distant crowd who have no idea what we do and how we do it. They work very closely with us, and in some cases are still part of it; but it seems all sense and knowledge goes out the window when these things come around.
A crud app? Hardly a ringing endorsement!!
We are overdue another rewire. I’ve seen 4 in ten years.
I’m getting binned at the next one I suspect.
Today I was sorting out some decades-old paperwork that came with the desk drawers I inherited at work and it was all worthwhile when I discovered somebody whose middle name on an application was He-Man.
He's Marvels new wheelchair bound hero. "SuperInclusive".
Finally back, the final verdict.
Colombia: lovely people, clearly a bit of a shitbox in some respects and narcotraficantes are still the single defining thing about it.
Ecuador: like a more shambolic version of Colombia. Awful food, but Quito is beautiful.
Peru: so unsafe that we called off the visits. Rapidly falling into shit
Bolivia: a complete toilet, but at least they have some kind of visible national identity and believe in collective improvement. Morales has been yewtreed and exiled, so whether his dogshit socialist replacement can achieve this I don't know. Enormous signs of Chinese soft power everywhere here.
Paraguay: an unredeemable shithole that has no aspirations to improve itself and is very happy making its living off importing contraband goods from Brazil. Do not go there, it's a toilet and you'll need the toilet.
Uruguay: best country visited by a mile. Would go back on holiday if it wasn't as far away as the moon. Montevideo is beautiful and the open plains around it were a lovely break from the jungle bollocks everywhere else.
Chile: is currently quite nice, even if much of the landscape looks like Mars, but can see it very rapidly going to toilet in the next few years. They have a 36 year old socialist president and women are advised not to drive alone because of widespread carjack rapes. Good luck.
UK: you come back and you just marvel at how fucking well organised it is.
My travelling companion: old, old man who knows his stuff but is horrendous at using a computer and in the second week started belittling me quite a lot in front of the customers. I would say he felt threatened but he really shouldn't have done.
Bloody Jehova's Witnesses turning up at the door as I'm about to start training someone. Also, there's a growing consensus among our HP's that Fibromyalgia is not a real disease.
Give us a sample of his belittling japery.
And yet, if a claimant has sent paperwork that moans about their pain (complete with a stairlift and bathroom hoist), I'm putting that down as the primary condition.
Hmmmm ....Currently, there are no specific laboratory or imaging tests for fibromyalgia.
What's an HP? Perhaps you have cause/effect reversed Spikey - perhaps people who have it are seen as lazy because their condition precludes them from being able to do much?
There are plenty of disease for which there is no confirmatory lab test or imaging test. Epilepsy, for example.
Nah, it's just a benefit con. Easy to fake, impossible to test. It's the same people that make Whiplash claims when the bus hits a pothole.
To clarify, I'm not saying it's entirely made up (although it might be), I'm just saying it's the leading benefit scam these days. Closely followed by depression and anxiety, but you don't get as much moolah for that.
Health professional. As for being easy to fake, it's an evidence based system so they need to con a handful of people. I don't doubt there's some conning going on but I also know legitimate claimants can be completely undone by the opinion of the bloke handling the assessment. Or the claimant not being able to provide great input/evidence. Or the health professional not being able to contact the specialists they need for further input.
So much of this process is in the lap of the Gods.
The number of legitimately struggling people I've seen that have been rejected is ridiculous too, granted. The problem is that the system is just so playable if you know what you're doing. Meanwhile, you get people at deaths door marked suitable for work because they play down how bad it is. It's immensely frustrating.
That's how it works. It's similar for me, the underground workers earn well into six figures because it's in lieu of long-term (/any) job security.
Has anyone been in their job/with their company long term? 15 years here, changed roles during though.
Just the 10 for me.
4 for me. Planning to leave when my boy starts school and I don't need WFH and hours that revolve around the school run.
I'm at about 4.5 years currently, which is by far my longest tenure. I can see myself staying a lot longer unless company fortunes/attitudes drastically change.
7 months. 😎
5 years, which in theory should take my holiday from 20 up to 22 days annually but I see this hasn't yet been reflected in the HR system.
20 days of holiday
I moaned about it in my last review, the MD said he wanted it raised but the South Africans wouldn't agree so it was out of his hands. I said good luck as it's not even slightly competitive in the current labour market.
I’m coming up on 8 years now which I think is my longest.
He must do, otherwise he won't be getting the legal minimum.