It's Personal...

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Wed Jul 23, 2014 6:20 pm

Covent wrote:Just if your company is anything like mine be prepared for the fact that if you succeed at one impossible task they will give you a harder one.

That sounds very familiar, and is the reason I'm dubious about it. I don't handle stress particularly well and don't especially want a job which is nothing but stress. I definitely don't want to ascend to management: I'm an extremely good analyst and I want to remain within that sphere.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Jul 23, 2014 6:39 pm

It varies from place to place, of course, but speaking as a software developer, there is strong reason to NOT want to ascend to higher tiers within a company, usually because it involves doing less of that technical thing you like/are good at and more doing other stuff like managing people and projects.

Some companies will accept a "thanks but no thanks" to a promotion offer; I've literally told my boss, "no, I'd rather keep doing more or less what I'm already doing but for more money" and he was cool with that. Some companies have specific titles to give out so that HR is happy with you getting promoted while really just having the same job but for more pay; in software it's usually Junior Developer -> Senior Developer -> Staff Developer or Senior Systems Architect or what-have-you. Other companies, not so much. You'll need to judge for yourself how well a "thanks but no thanks" response will be taken.

So yeah, kick this task's ass and, if it isn't suicide, feel free to remain where you are if that is what's working out for you.

EDIT: A grizzled old QA guy I used to work with would say, "The reward for doing an impossible task is another impossible task." There's nothing wrong with working on harder stuff sometimes, or having to deal with an emergency that sucks profoundly. However, if your responsibilities really are expanding and you're being pushed into a new, shittier position one inch at a time, stand up for yourself... again, assuming your company doesn't demand seppuku from that sort of behavior. Some companies just plain suck and a reasonable job will become an unreasonable one without affording you any recourse but to quit. But others will respond to an underling piping up and expressing justified concerns.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:21 pm

That's one of the main problems with todays corporations . .
You get to a point you like to do, where you are actually good at doing what you do . . and you get shit for payment . . If you want better payment, you need to be promoted to a sort of job you don't like doing and are actively bad at doing if it's really bad . . but you get more money, because you are now in the position to get more money . .

Count Arioch the 28th · Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:44 pm

Everyone eventually gets promoted to their own personal level of incompetence.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:46 pm

Money is always nice - I definitely haven't reached the point where I'm making enough to not worry about it - but I would rather do something I enjoy than something I hate for more money.

The issue with this project is that it's really interesting work, and it potentially leads to me getting more very interesting work. I'm leaving the realms of the people who do the same thing every day, and entering the realms of people who get to run around fixing problems. That's the fun bit, and it just remains to be seen if I can handle the stress.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Jul 28, 2014 4:33 am

http://imgur.com/a/q8aTN#0

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 28, 2014 7:55 am

Laertes wrote:I have recently been moved onto a new project in the company which has some very senior people watching it. It's a really interesting piece of work but the visibility is scary. What's most intimidating is the prospect of success: if I deliver then I'm going to be expected to keep on doing it, and may have a very serious chance of being fast-tracked to somewhere more senior. There's a large part of me that's getting pretty rabbit-in-the-headlights about this and just wants to hide instead of rising to the challenge.

Does anyone have any tips?

The thing to remember is that the problems of success are going to happen or not happen much later. You may not get promoted even if you knock this project and the next ten projects out of the park because promotions are only erratically based on merit. This is why you try to focus on the project so that you can tell the hiring manager of your next company the cool story about how you nailed a particularly hairy project.

Focus on the problem at hand and not some theoretical future problem that might not exist. As the great Willy Nelson once said, "never count your money while you are sitting at the table."

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 9:41 pm

http://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lov ... lhu-mythos

Post by **fbmf** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 10:39 pm

K wrote:
Laertes wrote:I have recently been moved onto a new project in the company which has some very senior people watching it. It's a really interesting piece of work but the visibility is scary. What's most intimidating is the prospect of success: if I deliver then I'm going to be expected to keep on doing it, and may have a very serious chance of being fast-tracked to somewhere more senior. There's a large part of me that's getting pretty rabbit-in-the-headlights about this and just wants to hide instead of rising to the challenge.

Does anyone have any tips?
The thing to remember is that the problems of success are going to happen or not happen much later. You may not get promoted even if you knock this project and the next ten projects out of the park because promotions are only erratically based on merit. This is why you try to focus on the project so that you can tell the hiring manager of your next company the cool story about how you nailed a particularly hairy project.

Focus on the problem at hand and not some theoretical future problem that might not exist. As the great Willy Nelson once said, "never count your money while you are sitting at the table."

Willie may have covered it, but that's a Kenny Rogers song.

Game On,
fbmf

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 11:04 pm

Hey Ancient, congrats!

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 11:05 pm

Danke! I'm chuffed.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Tue Jul 29, 2014 11:17 pm

That's awesome!!!!!!

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 5:17 am

So I've been making a set of signs for the various non-fiction sections - you know, like 534: Physics (Light and Sound), 540: Chemistry and so on.

The thing about leaving someone like me in control of that is you're leaving it up to my brain. Which people on the Den know is a dangerous thing.

I've tried to leave politics out of it (so "Immigration and Population" does not show our concentration camps), and keeping it SFW obviously*. But "Forensics" gets Horatio Caine. Now I've started a task of seeing how often I can make pokemon relevant to what I'm doing.

This library is going to have a lot of pokemon in its future.

*Interesting fact: if you do a Google Image Search on "myth", you mostly get tits.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:06 am

Dewey Decimal or what? I might be able to find you some good images, like

Chemistry

Philosophy and Psychology

Religion

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:11 am

Medicine:

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:12 am

No, no, she's in Australia. The Religion picture needs to be a Jedi.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:46 am

I had assumed it would be done by BISAC instead of Dewey but that's probably just my own bookshop experience.

In either case, being as Koumei's from the hemisphere which understands how rugby is played, here's one for Political Science:

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:03 am

I had a stranger than usual conversation about gender and sexuality on omegle's question section (basically someone asks a question, 'Are you lesbian' in this case, and two random people discuss it) while burning time between classes.

http://logs.omegle.com/58327d9

I probably offended some groups at some point or other in there, and I apologize for that.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:22 am

Koumei wrote:*Interesting fact: if you do a Google Image Search on "myth", you mostly get tits.

Keep in mind that Google filters results based on your search history. When I search "myth" I mostly get assorted video games and what looks like clipart. I got a full frontal Icarus before I got to the centaur tits.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:41 am

For the work PC, that's... odd, to say the least.

I'll definitely need to put House in for Medicine, yeah. And there'll be more pokemon. Always more. So far we have "Rocks & Minerals", "Evolution" and "Water" getting the pokemon treatment.

For religion, I found a cool picture that had all these different symbols, but then I noticed that they had put "Communism" as one of them. That pissed me off enough to not use that one, and just find another thing that had a bunch of (this time mostly Judeo-Christian) religious symbols. I was tempted to slip in a Chaos symbol or something.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:45 am

For religion I would recommend this:

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:55 am

Pahahahaha.

That said, thanks to The Unbelievable Truth, I now need to change it, replacing the Christianity symbol (the crucifix) with a cup of coffee. What with coffee (the drink) being a Christian creation and all that. I think the plant gets to claim "no religion" though, being a plant.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 1:51 am

So my folks have this...tradition.

We're good at practical jokes. Some benevolent (the invisible walls come to mind), some malevolent (I know two non-obvious ways to ruin your car, and several more that'd make you unhappy when you discovered what happened).

So we have a long history of getting each other and playing them on kids.

Right now, I'm planning a snipe hunt because I've been in a good mood and feeling a bit evil. Get several respectable adults to back me up when I tell some kids, the oldest being about eight or nine, that a snipe is a small bird that looks for food on the ground and has a call like "SNIPE SNIPE SNIPE!" and that you hunt them by running around the woods with a sack shouting "SNIPE SNIPE SNIPE!" and then see how long I can keep them running around. And also see if I can record it.

There's a small amount of woods nearby. I'm going to get some bags and wait for a weekend when a lot of the kids around.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:23 am

Try to push how ridiculous you can make them look. Like say they have to wear brightly coloured feathers in their hair while they do so, or something.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:50 am

I did think of telling them they all have to bird-hop around, too.

But they're kids and clumsy so that's kinda unfair and liable to cause tripping and scratching