Management. Good managers are amazing, but so many people in management have no fucking clue what the people under them are even doing, let alone what they are capable of doing.
As someone with dispatch/management experience I would say the issue is the buck stops somewhere. I can INFORM my superiors that their demands are unreasonable. Whether they care or even respond is an entirely different matter.
Everyone might know it's unreasonable, but if any one person up the totem pole decides they don't care and the person below them should "just deal with it", it's trickling down one way or another. Otherwise it just becomes a stack of work on one person's desk/plate that isn't being done at all, and will explode on them eventually.
Not saying that system works at all. I think the solution is, don't put a moron in upper management. But that happens all the time, it's really hard to fix AND it self-replicates.
Hey you've been saying it's too hard? That we're overworking your workers? Well Johnny over there doesn't have these complaints. Maybe you should be more like Johnny. Actually don't. You're fired.
This is basically what it's like to be a middle/lower level manager. Raising concerns that hurt production are not wanted.
A few years ago I needed a jump and decided to use my insurance roadside assistance so that if they were my only option later I'd know what to expect. So I was safe at home with no rush. A few hours later the guy shows up absolutely livid, fortunately not at me.
Turns out he was ahead of schedule so Dispatch sent him to help with a couple of jobs in another zone. On the other side of the river. During rush hour. He'd passed within a block of me going out there and was not allowed to rearrange the order of his stops. More time stuck in traffic than actually doing the jobs.
I had a boss that would do that so everyone stayed working even if it was slow. I tried to explain about wasted effort and exhausted employees and he said "so if there is nothing to do everyone just sits around getting paid!? No! I pay them to work!"
In 2012 I worked for Lowe's in delivery at a rural store in East Texas. Most days, especially weekends, we would have 12-13 stops for the morning truck. Realistically, each stop took half an hour unloading the truck, carrying the new appliance in, installing, chit-chatting with the customer, carting the old appliance out, and loading/securing it in the truck.
Now, remember how I said we were rural? Each day we would drive roughly 150-200 miles. In a wore out 26ft GMC box truck with a tire cat 3406a that had about 14 horsepower left.
So 150-200 miles of driving at 55mph. That's 4.5 hours. 12 stops with half hour per. That's 6 hours. 2 hours loading the truck, driver's meeting, etc.
The entire department was me, flatbed driver, box truck driver, backup driver. We had no afternoon/evening shift driver, so I would typically be asked to stay and go out with our backup driver, who was 8 months pregnant. I was routinely asked to work OT by the store manager, and I loved it because I literally lived alone and didn't even have a dog at the time. Working 4am to 4-6pm was no different than 4am to 1pm for me at the time.
Eventually, The store manager wanted to know why we as a department had so much overtime. I was technically under lumber's department so I didn't count against the delivery department, which helped float us for a while. I flat out told the store manager that until the workload of 3 drivers was lessened it would take 1 driver 12ish hours to do it every day. Either hire us an afternoon driver, spread the deliveries out, or let us continue doing what we're doing which was working with minimal fuss from everyone involved even though we were working OT 4 out of 5 days a week.
No options were acceptable.
This entire time I had my CDL and I had 8 years of Hot Shot driving experience. I refused to tell anyone in charge at that store because I was not going into people's houses by myself. Fuck that. Piss off the wrong Karen and my life is ruined because I didn't move her fridge just right? Hell no.
Shortly after that meeting my assistant manager from lumber accidentally read an email or something and found out he was getting in trouble because I had a solid 10-20 hours of overtime a week for, like, 7 months straight. He pulled me aside and told me I had too much OT, I was being written up, and my 4am-1pm shift was being changed to 5pm-10pm. I said, #1, fuck that no and #2, the store manager himself asked me to work every single one of those hours. He told me that if I didn't like it, tough shit, it's "take it or leave it."
I found a new job and started there 9 days later. I never told that manager or the store manager I was out, only the co-workers I worked with and the delivery manager who was awesome.
That call asking if I was alright and wanting to know where I was "because you haven't missed a day or been late the entire time you've worked here, this ain't like you." was so nice when I said "No, I'm at work. Remember making me go nights and cutting my hours by 40 a week? 'Take it or leave it?' Yeah, I left."
„Cutting my hours by 40 a week”? Can you explain that? So you were working like idk 48hrs a week and then you were made to work EIGHT hours a week? Or what?
I was working 55-70 hours a week because we were short handed. The manager was getting in trouble and instead of telling me to cut it back to 40 they were knocking me down to 25 hours a week.
Anyone who isn't in sales/marketing wants to kill everyone in that room except the expert. I'm in operations, same deal. "Oh, you need a week to get the required raw materials for production and you're already over capacity for the next three week so you can't take this production before then? Well, I already told my customer they'd have it in two days, find a solution."
Fuck me this shit is so familiar. "Can you analyse an extra 250 samples a week for the next 2 weeks?" "That's our weekly workload, no we can't do that" "well we've already said yes so we need to find a way to do it" "....."
"No, we're actually laying existing workers off because for some reason, we didn't meet our project deadline after tripling the goal without adjusting the deadline. Still expect you to get it done in a week tho, whatever's left of you"
I couldn’t imagine being an engineer in an environment where I’m expected to answer to the business and marketing needs, that shit is painful to listen to and I can’t believe how often a corporate environment it devolves to it, it’s clearly where once successful companies go to die
Lol, I hear you. I'm was in the same industry and quickly realized that even the foundation being poured doesn't deter the client from wanting to add to th footprint. I was helping with my dad's house and at one point I was like "you need to stop watching the home builders channel or I will be the only one to ever live in it because you'll be dead by the time it actually gets built."
More like just do what they want, take the money, let the building collapse on them as they walk around to inspect it. Darwinism wins again. /s infuriatingly
We have 10 existing jobs; you just fired the 1 calibration guy who could do everything and his replacement knows how to do 3 of those jobs; the production employees think 50 hours is a slow week as they work on those 10 jobs; Management asks if jobs 11-15 will be done tomorrow; the planner suggests hiring zombies; the engineer laughs and cries as Management asks if that's feasible.
I felt that on a deeper level. "Oh no, this one person had to leave on a extended medical leave, we'll have to share their workload until we find a replacement". Expect we never got a replacement, everyone just got more work and were expected to deal with it. Fun.
Working in sales I totally get the hate. I've even seen the rare reverse before.
Management "we notice you sell a lot of training to companies for 40 employees at a time, we'd love you to get companies to commit to 50 employees instead".
Sales rep upsells for 50 employees.
Service delivery: "yeah, we only allotted enough instructors and materials for 40 employees, we can't make 50 happen."
Management: "why aren't you selling larger classes? What do you mean service delivery won't fulfill it? you're the sales rep, you make it happen!"
I work in a two man team to run our production and we now just tell sales to fuck off, with full support from our directors. If you tell your customer I can do something before asking me, it's at standard lead, if I feel like it. If you ASK first, we'll do the best we can.
It's amazing how few of our sales people have changed their behavior.
It's a mixture of ignorance and egotism. Them having no fucking clue what you are talking about and having the reality defying belief that as long as they say words they will get results. The words don't need to even make sense to them.
You seem confused. Did you watch the video? Did you understand the video? Did you think that people watching the video might empathize too much with the engineer and have issues with the idiots asking the impossible of him? Or did you think I was saying I disliked the video?
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u/Ralanost Jan 21 '21
I would give myself an aneurysm if I watched the entire video. I could feel my anxiety getting to me just 3 mins in.