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RULES:
My job was like: "Nobody here really knows what your job entails, the last guy who did it quit to live in a a van in southeast Asia a month ago, and nobody has time to help you figure it out, but you're already six weeks behind. Best of luck."
By the end of two years I was able to write my job description.
Or at least what you ended up doing.
At my first startup job, I was given access to the prod database, the customer-facing email address, full rights to the git repository and domain admin rights, and told to set up my dev environment on day 1 (I had zero coding experience and had been open about it).
At my first corporate job, the only task for the first day was to give feedback on whether I'm comfortable with the ergnomics of my chair, monitor setup and mouse.
The nice thing about large corporate environments is that you can hide and get away with doing very little. I was able to get large amounts of time allotted to small tasks, complete them in a day and slack off for the rest of the week, and still be rewarded for the "hard work". In my off time, I actually worked on automating some of my work so it would be quicker to do next time. Of course, no one knew this because it was not planned anywhere.
The pay is lower and you learn less and become rusty in everything else. As such, it wasn't a great environment for starting in, but would probably be a good environment to work the last few years in.
We have a world class security setup, also we're going to hand you your plaintext password printed out in a sansserif font where you can't tell similar letters apart.
Like anyone in a corporate job has correct access on day 1
We are still working on getting your laptop. If you could quietly jork it over here, we might be able to get it to you by next week.
A Password is a thing that protects you from hackers. If you work here for long enough, you might even get your own account.
heck, i had a consultancy gig where the customer wanted me on-site for intro 400km away, and i had to spend a few days with no hardware at all, never mind access. also it was a high-security thing so i had to be escorted around at all times until they could sort out the badge thing. very productive week, that. at least got a few hotel breakfasts out of it.
My first day was sitting for 8 hours abandoned in a cubicle because my new boss forgot to put in the new hire requests for IT. No user, no email, no nothing. Only reason I had a laptop at all was because they happened to find an old one in a drawer.
This was my first month and a half one time
It's not always for lack of trying. I spent a year or so building the integration (from a box of scraps!) between the shiny new HR system and our IDP. This integration was supposed to be functional out of the box according to the HR system salesgoblin. It didn't just need to be configured, it needed to be built from scratch because they didn't actually support hybrid AD/Entra setups managed from the AD side. Which was only the unofficial standard for Windows based shops at the time.
Anyway, I wanted to make it grant employees access to shit based off a combo of Job Title and Department. On a technical level, it's basic baby stuff. Concatenate the Dept and Title into a string, use that as the key to a hashtable with the access they need listed. Bish bash bosh, bob's your uncle.
It would have been a cakewalk compared to all the shit I had to build for handling separations and all the data retention shit around those.
But none of the department managers could actually tell us what the fuck their workers needed access to. Like maybe 3% had any idea at all. And I didn't have the team or time to try and do data analytics across the access of everyone at the company just to get an unreliable best guess.
So it just handles setting new hires up with the basic access everyone gets and separations. Still a savings of ~1 hour per employee.
It's been something like 7 years since I built that integration. They're finally going to replace it with a true access management platform. It's cost them multiple millions so far, has an entire new department dedicated to the thing, it has been "in-progress" for two years, and it still hasn't replaced my shit yet.
My favorite part is when they come to me months in to something they're trying to get working, and I'm able to point them at where they made mistaken assunptions at the first step leading to the mess they're currently in.
I provided a ton of in-depth notes on our current standards, the weird gotchas/deviations, every single stumbling block and edge case I had found, all the seemingly logical and safe assumptions that don't actually hold. I don't think they read any of it. I keep asking them to reach out before they start working on a new piece of functionality. They don't.
So now I get to tell them things like "that assumption you built this piece of logic off of will bite you in the ass in this specific way", they say they'll take it under consideration, and I laugh knowing this whole project will probably implode under the weight of incorrect assumptions before it's finished.
Yeah, in my own experience, small companies in general are kinda "Here are the 3 hats we're expecting you to wear. You'll probably get more later" whilst large ones do have a tendency for "Here's the kind of bolt you'll be tightening. Only ever tighten this specific kind of bolt".
That said you do get way more amateurism in smaller companies, especially Startups.
That's how large corps want you to work until you show you can do more and then you get promoted to handle all 63,93937 Bolts for an extra $0.10/hr
This is how your copilot gets sucked out the front window of a Boeing 737.
From my experience, here's why that happens (sorry for the wall of text, but this is actually a structural reason hence complex):
In my experience the being "promoted" to do all kinds of bolts is not really a thing done by the corporation itself, it's a thing done by low and mid-level management - it's not a company structural thing, it's a management "hack".
You see, big companies have the numbers of workers to be able to hire very specialized people for just about everything, whilst smaller companies do not hence why in big companies workers are supposed to do one kind of thing only, whilst in small companies one wears several hats from the very start.
Specialists are generally much better at doing that one thing they always do than generalists would be, so they're more productive (sometimes A LOT more) hence why companies will hire specialists when they're big enough that they can properly and full-time use the work of people who do just one thing alone and nothing else (so, for example, whilst a indie games company with 3 employees can't really have, say a full time audio engineer that does nothing else, a big games company can).
BUT, even big companies have stuff poping up at times that doesn't quite fit any one specialization, such as stuff that crosses multiple domains, problems outside the usual areas or when they have to handle something that's rarelly done.
And this shit always happens - there is theoretically an infinite number of specializations, so whilst you can do most of the day to day of a business with specialists, you can't handle everything all the time with only specialists.
However the big corps hire specialists. That's what they do because specialists are more competent and proeficient at doing that one thing they're specialized in. Their internal hiring and rewards structures are geared towards that because that gives them the best people at doing something.
But middle management still has to solve all problems, not just the usual and predictable things for which they have specialists, so for the stuff that falls outside the specialist cover they'll try and get the specialists to do stuff outside their areas and if sombody has shown higher flexibility and that they're good at tackling such problems that fall between the cracks, they're "promoted" to handle much more than what they were hired to handle. But because this is a "hack" from a lower level of management, it isn't structurally recognized in the corporation and such people aren't formally recognized in the corporate structure for such abilities, so the maximum increase in rewards that those people can get is only what said managers can fit in their budget (if they're freelancers) or worse if they're empoyeees since rewards are constrained by salary tables defined several levels above said managers in a corporation. Even if these are good managers and thus try to push beyond that, it's incredibly difficult for them to shift things at a higher level to have the company itself actually recognize, reward and retain such people for what they are - in a corporation even a mid-level manager is too low level to even just nudge corporate policy.
Meanwhile, in small and sometimes mid-sized companies it's usually different and it's far more likely that a mid-level manager can actually shift things at the highest levels to recognize, reward and retain such "fixer" competencies when they discover they need them.
In my experience that's pretty damn close to impossible in corporations and hence why you don't actually get a proper promotion in a corporation.
If you're good at figuring anything out and doing all kinds of work, you're better of working either in smaller companies or a freelancer - I don't thing I've ever seen a "fixer" kind of position formally recognized and properly rewarded in a corporate structure, or if they're there they're literally only in the business side of things, never in support areas (so, for example, an Investment Bank might recognized those in Trading or as Analysts, but not in IT).
One time at a startup I had a bunch of mandatory document training that started day 1 and didn’t have a concrete timeline. I finished in the four hours I had on the first day, but pretended to still be reading them for the full second day as well. Go to my boss day 3 and tell him I’m done, and he said “Already?!” with narrowed eyes.
It was so weird, how long did he expect it to take? I later realized that he fully expected me to memorize every one of the many technical documents, and not just remember what information was where so I could look it up when I needed it. He also refused to give me what hours he wanted me to be there, which I thought was laid back but later learned was his way of saying “I expect you to get here before me and leave after me, which is a twelve hour period that moves four hours in either direction depending on my mood.”
But to put all of that in context you have to remember the pay, which was also bad.
But to put all of that in context you have to remember the pay, which was also bad.
Lol the one I worked at had a 30% turnover rate because of this. Ridiculously skilled engineers working for a 8-14 month stint before they secured a much better job at a different company.
Even their longest working lead, who had joined since the start as a junior, left a couple of months after I joined
The funniest moment was when ~~HR~~ people ops posted the average expected salary ranges to confluence, which was a full 30% higher than what they announced for yearly raises.
I'm working at a mega Corp now (not one you've probably heard of) and it's a fucking farce.
We had a meeting last week about some problems with the current process. People kind of nodded along. Meeting was drawing to a close. No concrete tasks or assignments.
I say, "great. Who's taking lead on this? Can we have a proposal by Monday and make a decision by Wednesday?"
Suddenly management people are like "whoa whoa whoa stay in your lane"
Okay then why don't you fucking manage?
This happens all the time. We have long ass meetings with the whole team, talk about problems, but then no one is assigned to do anything and nothing changes.
There's just so much incompetence and ineptitude. Some of it is probably coming from hidden, bad, incentives
Honestly this one's on you, pal. Why do you even care about the megacorp's business?
Because the current process means constant merge conflicts that I have to deal with, and constant bugs I have to deal with.
But, on the other hand, maybe you're right and I should just check out and spend a day "fixing git problems" too
I don't want to push back too much, but I disagree with the other poster. You deserve meaningful work, and you seem like an educated person, so probably society as a whole would benefit more if you did something more interesting than fixing the outcomes of poor process. The amount of of human potential flushed down the toilet because MBAs insist on an ill fitting Taylorist approach to managing software projects is, in my view, a great moral harm. It is your professional duty, and in your personal interest, to either push back or move.
I was in the corporate medical industry. The only things that got handled at all in a efficient time was those required by law. Like if there was a incident in the field we had to have an initial report within a week and a corrective action within 30 days. Preventive actions were longer term, didn't have a deadline so it was not uncommon for it to go on for a year or more.
I can't give a real example for legal reason but let's a product was sold which gave electrical shocks to a patient. Within a week we had to tell the fda the cause was a faulty resistor. Within 30 days we had to correct our system, for example assign a person to test that resistor with a dmm on every device. Easy enough, give the operator who installs the resistor a dmm, update the instructions to say to measure that resistor and give a 5 minute training to said operator telling them that they have to measure it. Easy to do in 30 days and required. Now really the root cause was we didn't test for that in our multiple automated tests. The preventive solution would be update the automated testing software to check that. That has no time limit. It now becomes low priority. We did have to give an estimated time line, say within 2 years. By the time that deadline approaches most people who originally said that have left the company and new people are unaware. They submit an extension, and it's low priority again. Another 2 years go by. Now the high priority is the next product release. The old product will be discontinued so no one cares. So for 4 years and possibly several more years after it the company pays a person to manually measure a resistor. The automated test would eliminate this need, be more reliable, have documented results but wasn't implemented because it's low priority since there's no legally obligated time line.
government job: it haven't set your laptop up yet, but you should have it by the end of the week.
Could be my company too, sometimes.
HR has a knack for sending the "incoming employee, user account plz" notice the day before said employee is supposed to start, or sometimes on the day they start, or even two weeks later.
Cue the enraged calls to IT by a manager that's (usually) just as faultless as our user management team (unless the manager also submitted paperwork too late)...
I’ve worked at four private companies and two of them had me sitting around useless for the first week waiting for a computer
So yes there is unfortunately a small number of people in the corporate world who need that specific training but what it mostly is is plausible deniability for the company. In case you do get your password stolen or some such the company can then turn around and say that you had the mandated security training which makes it easier to let you go. It’s all so they can cover their asses
I have told my coworkers before.
The company does not make you take ladder training so you can learn how to climb a ladder, its so if you fall off, a lawyer can ask if you were following the ladder training exactly.
Big Corpo HR: "We're going to need you to watch 8 hours of videos about 'empathy' and 'active listening'."
6 hours later...
"...and body language is very important. It's perfectly ok to rest your chin on your hand but DO NOT cover your mouth because it gives the impression that you're holding something back."
“Now we need you to watch 4 hours of videos to teach you how not to sexually harass everybody.”
Accidentally harass anyone. You have to be careful because it's easy to say things that are not necessarily intended to cause offense but could be perceived offensively by the other party.
Things like, "Wow! You look great today, Janice. That top really accents your tits."
Or, "Ryan, I think you would be a great fit for the managers job. If your interested, you should stop by my place tonight and fuck my brains out."
Now, as innocent as both of those scenarios might appear on the surface, they are both examples of different types of sexual harassment.
Oh my god you’re a life saver. I would have totally harassed my coworkers had I not been armed with that knowledge. To say thanks, would you care for a handjob?
Currently I'm acting as a PI in a research institute. I'm still baffled by the amount of people we hire that have a postdoc in advanced computational topics and still struggle to do the most basic things such as sshing into a computational cluster to run their calculations.
I hired you because you're more expert than me on the topic, and I always end up studying what you're supposedly expert about so that I can explain you what to do...
Healthcare day 1: There are 3 emergencies you have to tend to immediately. If you have any questions your supervisor will show up eventually (or not) to go with you through all your cases for 7 minutes. Please be prepared. Of course you can call him anytime (if you dare). Oh and please take this student with you and teach him everything.
Disability care: there are 10 people here we care for, just like get to know them I guess and if you have any questions...umm... I'm not sure who you ask but I'll ask my manager to ask their manager and maybe get back to you if you ask a dozen times.
I'm very lucky to work in a pretty good team now who are trying to rebuild a previously not great team and system but some are truly terrible. And management have no idea what their doing. Like as we try to build systems that should already absolutely exist (inductions, complaint systems, incident reporting, basic shit) and ask management they are scrambling for answers. Yet we have all the signs "encouraging" clients to make complaints because they legally have to display them 🤦♀️
Corporate fishing training makes me feel genuinely bad for the people who actually need it. I can't say it's through "no" fault of their own, but I at least recognize I was greatly privileged to grow up in an era where I had home computing technology nearly all of my life but there was enough friction that I had to learn how to be smart about it. Some of it really is statistically the era they grew up in, and it makes me reflect if, in 30 years, I'll be getting training on how not to get blip blop zooped by a schmazdazzler and get all the questions wrong because the answer was that you never smap your smoop with a schmazdazzler.
My dad was one of the guys who was in charge of administering those to his company. They had different tiers of difficulty, i think ranging from 1-5. They always sent IT and Engineering the 5s and they passed with flying colors.
Hr and finance never got harder than a 2 and they always fucked them up
Nearly accurate. Apart from corporate job only providing you a laptop after a week or two because someone forgot to notify the IT about your starting date or the IT processing jobs in the order of receiving them rather than urgency of these.
Don't put that shit on IT. HR is the department that can't get the fuckin onboarding form right, can't send it to the right people, or just straight up don't do one and expect us to be mind reader's.
can't get an interview unless you've been doing the exact job they're hiring for for the last five years, but once you're hired they assume it's your first day on earth
Sooo at my workplace, disability, they like to keep floor workers low, the scum we are, and give us no training or time to learn anything about the background processes - despite several of us asking for years.
Just recently they put out an internal job call to us all that was basically all the shit we've been asking to learn but "must have at least 5 years experience with this program and that program". Oh you mean the shit you've refused to let us stay on shift an extra hour to actually have non-client time to learn because "it's not in the budget"? Well done management.
From my experience, a password is a tool used to secure my workday from a bad guy called "productivity".
Because why use an SSH key when I can enter the same username and password I used to log into the workstation every time I need to do something through the VPN? (It keeps logging off every time the connection breaks.)
A password is something we send via email when someone else wants access to the admin account.