Author Topic: A random thread for small things that don't really warrant a thread of their own  (Read 2945925 times)

Andrij

  • Андрій
  • Ερασιτεχνικός μισάνθρωπος
If you're going out, go in a blaze of glory!
;D  Andrij.  I pronounce you Complete and Utter GIT   :thumbsup:

Beardy

  • Shedist
If you're going out, go in a blaze of glory!
Well they've got us by the S&C there. The pension scheme I've been a member of for 39 years provides its members with protection against redundancy by paying a lump of 3 times salary, enhancement in paid-in years and no actuarial right down on early retirements is about to be closed. Therefore any enhanced 'leaver payment' is entirely at the companies discretion so we've got to behave ourselves to some extent.
It is very hard to motivate oneself though when you are almost certain that you won't be employed by Christmas. The actual extent of the reductions is 2/3 or more of the UK based middle and higher managers!
For every complex problem in the world, there is a simple and easily understood solution that’s wrong.

ian

I may have recently pointed our to our new 'transformative' bridge-level management team that many of their fab new ideas while fab aren't new. Those of us who have been here longer have already had these ideas. The issue has been in implementing those fab ideas. Otherwise they'll just continue to be fab ideas.

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.

Beardy

  • Shedist
I may have recently pointed our to our new 'transformative' bridge-level management team that many of their fab new ideas while fab aren't new. Those of us who have been here longer have already had these ideas. The issue has been in implementing those fab ideas. Otherwise they'll just continue to be fab ideas.

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.
I might have already been over that bridge. I have tried to cross back and be much more positive about 'their' ideas, but I think I might have burnt it as I passed. This is one of the reasons1 that I do not think I will be in the third that get to stay... I suppose I could always go postal.

1. I'm also old(ish) and have a lot of unhelpful experience because I joined the company in 1978. This also makes me expensive and more difficult to regrade downwards which seems to be a strong plank in their cost cutting exercise.
For every complex problem in the world, there is a simple and easily understood solution that’s wrong.

Basil

  • Um....err......oh bugger!
  • Help me!
Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.

So, that's a win.  :thumbsup:
Admission.  I'm actually not that fussed about cake.

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
I may have recently pointed our to our new 'transformative' bridge-level management team that many of their fab new ideas while fab aren't new. Those of us who have been here longer have already had these ideas. The issue has been in implementing those fab ideas. Otherwise they'll just continue to be fab ideas.

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.
I might have already been over that bridge. I have tried to cross back and be much more positive about 'their' ideas, but I think I might have burnt it as I passed. This is one of the reasons1 that I do not think I will be in the third that get to stay... I suppose I could always go postal.

1. I'm also old(ish) and have a lot of unhelpful experience because I joined the company in 1978. This also makes me expensive and more difficult to regrade downwards which seems to be a strong plank in their cost cutting exercise.

Makes me glad I spent most of my professional life free-lancing.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Wowbagger

  • Former Sylph
    • Stuff mostly about weather
Quote from: Dez
It doesn’t matter where you start. Just start.

ian

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.

So, that's a win.  :thumbsup:

As a professional management dodger, yes.

I may have recently pointed our to our new 'transformative' bridge-level management team that many of their fab new ideas while fab aren't new. Those of us who have been here longer have already had these ideas. The issue has been in implementing those fab ideas. Otherwise they'll just continue to be fab ideas.

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.
I might have already been over that bridge. I have tried to cross back and be much more positive about 'their' ideas, but I think I might have burnt it as I passed. This is one of the reasons1 that I do not think I will be in the third that get to stay... I suppose I could always go postal.

1. I'm also old(ish) and have a lot of unhelpful experience because I joined the company in 1978. This also makes me expensive and more difficult to regrade downwards which seems to be a strong plank in their cost cutting exercise.

Their ideas are good ideas. It's just the concept that they've never occurred to anyone before and they're somehow a unique realisation of our new management and their transformational zeal. Some of us have been banging our heads on this stuff for a decade. I appreciate their enthusiasm but that and yet more newly recruited managers won't make any of their ideas actually happen.

Their ideas are good ideas. It's just the concept that they've never occurred to anyone before and they're somehow a unique realisation of our new management and their transformational zeal. Some of us have been banging our heads on this stuff for a decade. I appreciate their enthusiasm but that and yet more newly recruited managers won't make any of their ideas actually happen.

Let me guess... making this things happen might involve (gasp!) investing in the grunt-level staff and spending cash on infrastructure (like, to pluck a *purely hypothetical* example out of the air, spending money on some ruddy drive arrays and RAM for the servers your company's products run on so that they don't fall over when the new month's content gets added and users try to access it...)

andytheflyer

  • Andytheex-flyer.....
I may have recently pointed our to our new 'transformative' bridge-level management team that many of their fab new ideas while fab aren't new. Those of us who have been here longer have already had these ideas. The issue has been in implementing those fab ideas. Otherwise they'll just continue to be fab ideas.

Anyway, they all nodded at my sage and mildly cynical advice and then didn't invite me to any further meetings.
I might have already been over that bridge. I have tried to cross back and be much more positive about 'their' ideas, but I think I might have burnt it as I passed. This is one of the reasons1 that I do not think I will be in the third that get to stay... I suppose I could always go postal.

1. I'm also old(ish) and have a lot of unhelpful experience because I joined the company in 1978. This also makes me expensive and more difficult to regrade downwards which seems to be a strong plank in their cost cutting exercise.

It was a year or 2 back (or maybe a year or 2 more than that) that it dawned on me that since I was now in my early 60's, with 40 years in the industry, that there really was nothing new under the sun.  Other than that is some technology helping you to make design designs way faster than your brain needed to say 'hold on, let me sleep on this.......'.  Which is why I was often called on to apply my experience to recover a situation newly-created by the younger staff/management that we old'uns had already buggered up many years ago, sorted it then and not made the same mistake again since. 

In grunt-speak, it's called experience.  In management speak it's called 'humour him, we know best, and anyway he's way too expensive to use on our projects'.

Look at the impending situation as an opportunity and when they ask you for your security pass, take that as the first day of the rest of your life.  I baled out of my long-term employment for other reasons, but watching the same mistakes made over and over again, by people who were paid way more than me, made me very happy when circumstances said I could afford to go.

Every cloud has a silver lining.....

ian

Their ideas are good ideas. It's just the concept that they've never occurred to anyone before and they're somehow a unique realisation of our new management and their transformational zeal. Some of us have been banging our heads on this stuff for a decade. I appreciate their enthusiasm but that and yet more newly recruited managers won't make any of their ideas actually happen.

Let me guess... making this things happen might involve (gasp!) investing in the grunt-level staff and spending cash on infrastructure (like, to pluck a *purely hypothetical* example out of the air, spending money on some ruddy drive arrays and RAM for the servers your company's products run on so that they don't fall over when the new month's content gets added and users try to access it...)

Yes, the company that used to own our mothership never bothered investing more than was needed to keep the wheels turning and revenue coming in. We also filled up with weirdly duplicated management structures, which were just holding places for people with appropriate time served and whose main and perhaps only skill was the ability to press 'forward' on emails. That and everything structured into non-communicative silos. So yes, new management is a good thing and a shake up welcome and needed. But they have also kept the old management and we've been waiting for those Friday emails thanking them for their service and wishing them well for a while. Not happened. We're now so top heavy that we could capsize if someone so much as farts in the boardroom. They just love creating new senior management permissions and then appointing mostly well-known industry people (who I imagine aren't cheap), often their former colleagues at previous businesses.

So anyway, to date all the investment seems to be in new senior managers who mull over common sense business ideas like they're new discoveries. We're a year and a half into a 'business transformation' that seems mostly theoretical. Given we're now owned by a private equity partnership and a big chunk of debt, they'll be looking at their 3 and 5-year returns. Mention of this, of course, is verboten in meetings. Our new owners love us and they'll invest in us forever. Yeah, and they'll be providing free unicorn parking in the basement. A more cynical person than me may ponder if much of this hiring and transformation is window-dressing intended to make the company look good sale in a year or so. In the background, they're cutting costs by shunting admin to India.

Ah, the old offshoring dodge; yes, content processing costs pennies (literally) a page, but meanwhile you've got to have another whole QA team (offshored as well) to check the garbage you get back, plus the extra six months and five passes to get it acceptably right, plus the UK staff to schedule and oversee all this stuff. Maybe, just maybe, there were advantages to doing all this in-house? From my highly scientific survey methodology of flipping through recent copyright pages, UK publishers seem to be using local typesetters again; whether that's going to be a longer-term shift I don't know.

Basil

  • Um....err......oh bugger!
  • Help me!
My wedding dodging tactic saw me join a group of volunteers clearing Himalayan Balsam from a stretch of river bank today.  Gosh it was warm.
Admission.  I'm actually not that fussed about cake.

My wedding dodging tactic saw me join a group of volunteers clearing Himalayan Balsam from a stretch of river bank today.  Gosh it was warm.

I went out for a ride. It was lovely.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

barakta

  • Bastard lovechild of Yomiko Readman and Johnny 5
I got myself invited to a friend's leaving pootle round nice places in town before she leaves and "oh here take my stuff" so I have acquired a teapot, jacket and a sign language book .

Wowbagger

  • Former Sylph
    • Stuff mostly about weather
Basil, there was a programme on R4 earlier in the week about harps made in Llandysul. I wondered if you were aware of the harp factory.
Quote from: Dez
It doesn’t matter where you start. Just start.

Basil

  • Um....err......oh bugger!
  • Help me!
Basil, there was a programme on R4 earlier in the week about harps made in Llandysul. I wondered if you were aware of the harp factory.

Yes.  You could see it from the first place we had in Llandysul.   You and Jan have cycled past it.

Which programme was it?
Admission.  I'm actually not that fussed about cake.

Clare

  • Is in NZ
My wedding dodging tactic saw me join a group of volunteers clearing Himalayan Balsam from a stretch of river bank today.  Gosh it was warm.

Vernon and I went to Wisley, it was wonderful hardly anybody else there.

I worked yesterday & took my daughter to a swimming gala in Nuneaton, so missed all the hullabaloo, thankfully.

I rather regret visiting Nuneaton and not diverting to see the Nuneaton Nipple mentioned on the Landmarks thread.
Haggerty F, Haggerty R, Tomkins, Noble, Carrick, Robson, Crapper, Dewhurst, Macintyre, Treadmore, Davitt.

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
This may come as a shock to some of you, but I have had my hair cut, and not just a little bit. Down to 2mm back and sides with a bit of length left on top.

In otherwords a little hipster like.

Maybe I should go and buy some skinny red jeans, now? On second thoughts I ran that idea past Mr T, yesterday and she voiced a _very_ firm "No".
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

Torslanda

  • Professional Gobshite
  • Just a tart for retro kit . . .
    • John's Bikes
Nah. Brown brogues & a short overcoat with the collar turned up, innit. Also you mustn't forget the tortoiseshell framed glasses.

When you've done all that I've got the perfect bike. It's a 70s Claude Butler Majestic that's been single speeded. Rusty as fuckFabulous patina . . .
VELOMANCER

Well that's the more blunt way of putting it but as usual he's dead right.

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
My lovely gold Claude Butler Majestique got nicked from my residence at Russells Hall Hospital, the week I took my driving test in January 1985.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
I got myself invited to a friend's leaving pootle round nice places in town before she leaves and "oh here take my stuff" so I have acquired a teapot, jacket and a sign language book .
A teapot is always a good thing to have.  :thumbsup:
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Wowbagger

  • Former Sylph
    • Stuff mostly about weather
Quote from: Dez
It doesn’t matter where you start. Just start.

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
The Celtic fans clearly enjoyed themselves!

https://www.facebook.com/Shauunnnn/videos/10214935180787076/

Mentioned that to Mrs T. She said "What on earth were they doing at Hampton Court?"
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight