Journal dedazo's Journal: This is how we roll 8
Recent phone conversation:
Director: Hey, so... we're making some staff adjustments
Me:
D: Yeah, we're releasing some of the people in the Fubar team.
(The Fubar team is working on a set of services that my project depends on)
M: Oh. What people?
D: Well, [names], and some of the testers as well.
M: That's a good 3/4 of the development team
D: Yeah, I know. Sorry
M: Well, we need to go back to the project plan and adjust our deliverable dates.
D: Um, thing is... the dates can't be changed. The business sponsor doesn't want any of them moved.
M: How am I supposed to deliver on the agreed dates then? I can't even meet the SLA, the production support staff is gone too. The dev team was going to provide the 180-day warranty support until the Service folks could get re-staffed.
D: Yeah well, we'll figure something out I guess.
M: Right.
Fast forward two weeks to last Friday:
M: Hey Director, I just noticed a bunch of postings on the Placement intranet site. For the Fubar team. Why aren't they posted to the external site?
D: Oh... well, we posted internally so the old team would be able to apply for them first.
M: Oh, well that's cool... waitaminute, these are [contract positions] with no benefits and lower rates!
D: Yeah well, that's the only way we could keep them.
M: [expletives and so on]
D: I understand, but there's nothing I can do about it. On the other hand we get to still meet those dates and not lose our funding!
M: [more expletives, etc]
D: OK, so we'll talk later. Thanks!
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Corporate America. You gotta love it.
I have an interview on Friday (Score:1)
at 8.15am that starts with a 45min practical test on using Excel followed by a 30min interview.
At less than half of what I used to earn. A base and boring job, but would provide income and security.
If the who said they would call by 30 June about other interviews I have had would pick up the phone (and yes I have chased them) then maybe I wouldn't to have even look at this.
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Hope that went well. I know it's tough out there. But best of luck finding something you *like*.
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Practical test 45min for Excel - produce 2 reports from data provided and write down notes and assumptions
Took 10 minutes to produce 2 pivot tables from 13,000 rows of data - data was complaint by person answering by entity by person complaining and by company.
35 min describing what is wrong with a) using exce for the problem - eg once the data set triples Excel will bork at >32,000 or so rows, b) the questions asked to be answered (wrong questions) and c) what is wrong with using unverifiable data for t
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You know, those kinds of situations are good for consulting opportunities. I *do* have a dime for almost every time I've heard "well it currently runs on Excel" or "well, we're using Access databases right now" :)
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They are converting "from a non-relational Lotus Notes database".
From the questions asked and skilsl they are looking for they have data integrity issues.
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Working with any Lotus product == fate worse than death.
I wish... (Score:2)
...the Corporate America I was last working at did that to me. Dilbertesque, for sure, but in the age of single-year federal budget deficits measured in trillions and Stuart Smalley going to the U.S. Senate, seemingly much fewer things strike me as out of the ordinary anymore.
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Oh it's not out of the ordinary at all. Stuff like this has been ordinary since 2001. Still funny as hell... or disturbing, depending which end of the stick you happen to be holding.