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Sure. Tip 1/1: about four months after I felt that way, I enquired into jobs in markets that paid exceptionally well within my skill set, in the technologies where I had demonstrable expertise (Microsoft in that case).
Soon enough I was called into three interviews. I was offered a position in the third (or second, or first: I don't recall). It entailed moving 1,000 miles. Being 30 (at the time) I didn't care much, never encumbering myself with anything I couldn't walk away from on a week's notice. Off I went, nearly doubling my salary in a market with at that time lower COL.
Today, I'm not clear if one has to move. I've had remote positions legitimately within my skill set and pay bracket offered the past year...opportunities with real legs, we could say. YMMV, I happen to like working remote and demonstrate effectiveness.
That's my solution, I and seldom stay anywhere more than three years in IT. The Microsoft role, first of several over a decade, lasted about that long back then. I was in-like-Flynn with networking contacts and fled the minute I started to smell the BS. They can call it roses, try and convince me it's roses, but the stink rises high enough I wise up.
I wise up fast these days. Hope that helps.
I had previously moved around a lot prior to taking this job. I agree - three to five years is about all you can get at most places, without moving into management.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jnojr
I don't see any harm in telling your manager, "I'm performing like hell, right? I'm doing more than anyone and everyone else, right? I'm doing at least two jobs, right? So, it's reasonable for me to see a real increase... no 2%. Right? What do you think is a reasonable figure that reflects the value of my contributions?"
The response will tell you everything you need to know.
I won't phrase it exactly like this, but next month's 1:1 is going to go down exactly this track from the first moment. If I'm going to have to straddle both teams, which no one else is doing, promote to the highest grade.
I lead a nearly eight figure implementation this summer. I'm over two other seven figure implementations. I've received great reviews for years.
If they're not going to acknowledge that with more money and a promotion, it's an easy market to move on in.
Last edited by Serious Conversation; 10-29-2021 at 01:22 PM..
Well, despite the reality of the situation, it's the CEO's job to instill confidence that the ship is heading in the right direction. They are literally the company's biggest cheerleader. I'd be more shocked if the CEO came up on stage and gave a dire evaluation of the situation. In the heat of battle, do you want your captain out there cowering in a fox hole screaming to his privates, "We're all going to die!"? They are likely well aware of the attrition problem. How they address it behind the scenes is more important than how they're presenting it in front of the employees at a town hall.
And that's not happening here.
The CEO is pretty much reviled throughout the community. I think some of it is deserved, most probably isn't. The CEO inspires no confidence. A lot of the issues have nothing to do with the leadership - staff shortages, healthcare worker burnout, etc., are nationwide. I don't think we're on a path here that's going to fix anything.
If nothing else, I see good money being thrown after bad. Executive leadership needs take ownership of problems and propose and implant remedial paths. So far, executive leadership doesn't believe there are any problems.
The CEO is pretty much reviled throughout the community. I think some of it is deserved, most probably isn't. The CEO inspires no confidence. A lot of the issues have nothing to do with the leadership - staff shortages, healthcare worker burnout, etc., are nationwide. I don't think we're on a path here that's going to fix anything.
If nothing else, I see good money being thrown after bad. Executive leadership needs take ownership of problems and propose and implant remedial paths. So far, executive leadership doesn't believe there are any problems.
Attrition, burnout, staff shortages seem to only matter to executive leadership once it starts impacting the financial statements. They are too far removed from day-to-day operations to know about or care that any of that is going on. It only gets noticed if/when the middle managers are bold enough to start griping about it, or the company starts feeling the impact of those issues. Meanwhile, you, your colleagues, and your managers get the pleasure of dealing with it.
The problems that turnover creates are lagging factors. It takes time to start noticing some of the damage it does on an organization. So I think it tends to take a lot of time before those issues are recognized and addressed.
For instance, I recently left an organization that started experiencing massive turnover. We're talking about people who had been with the company for 5+ years. A lot of them were fed up because they felt like they weren't being listened to by the executive leadership team. So a lot of them left, and the execs did nothing. But then a lot more of them left, and suddenly the execs started providing counter offers and retention bonuses. Pay rates for new jobs started creeping upwards, because they weren't attracting good talent. When the longest tenured person on the team winds up being a fresh grad who's only been there for 1.5 years and really knows nothing about navigating Corporate America or managing clients, it becomes a problem for your clients and hence the organization.
Well, despite the reality of the situation, it's the CEO's job to instill confidence that the ship is heading in the right direction. They are literally the company's biggest cheerleader. I'd be more shocked if the CEO came up on stage and gave a dire evaluation of the situation. In the heat of battle, do you want your captain out there cowering in a fox hole screaming to his privates, "We're all going to die!"? They are likely well aware of the attrition problem. How they address it behind the scenes is more important than how they're presenting it in front of the employees at a town hall.
There's a difference between being a confident cheerleader and burying you head in the sand. Too many execs want to bury their head in the sand and not see problems. They maintain intentional ignorance.
Sometimes, the best thing a leader can do is stand up there and acknowledge the truth. The troops can see it. So making false statements of cheer just leaves things worse.
There's a difference between being a confident cheerleader and burying you head in the sand. Too many execs want to bury their head in the sand and not see problems. They maintain intentional ignorance.
Sometimes, the best thing a leader can do is stand up there and acknowledge the truth. The troops can see it. So making false statements of cheer just leaves things worse.
I don’t disagree. That’s was separates genuinely good leadership from the rest.
That said, I’ve observed a lot more of the cheerleading in spite of the systemic issues. All I’m saying is that I understand their motivations behind those actions. I don’t necessarily agree with them though.
There's a difference between being a confident cheerleader and burying you head in the sand. Too many execs want to bury their head in the sand and not see problems. They maintain intentional ignorance.
Sometimes, the best thing a leader can do is stand up there and acknowledge the truth. The troops can see it. So making false statements of cheer just leaves things worse.
Bingo
I'm telling you if these leaders would pull their fat heads out of their you-know-what and admit the problem more people might try to stick it out.
Attrition, burnout, staff shortages seem to only matter to executive leadership once it starts impacting the financial statements. They are too far removed from day-to-day operations to know about or care that any of that is going on. It only gets noticed if/when the middle managers are bold enough to start griping about it, or the company starts feeling the impact of those issues. Meanwhile, you, your colleagues, and your managers get the pleasure of dealing with it.
The problems that turnover creates are lagging factors. It takes time to start noticing some of the damage it does on an organization. So I think it tends to take a lot of time before those issues are recognized and addressed.
For instance, I recently left an organization that started experiencing massive turnover. We're talking about people who had been with the company for 5+ years. A lot of them were fed up because they felt like they weren't being listened to by the executive leadership team. So a lot of them left, and the execs did nothing. But then a lot more of them left, and suddenly the execs started providing counter offers and retention bonuses. Pay rates for new jobs started creeping upwards, because they weren't attracting good talent. When the longest tenured person on the team winds up being a fresh grad who's only been there for 1.5 years and really knows nothing about navigating Corporate America or managing clients, it becomes a problem for your clients and hence the organization.
The biggest issue is that anyone above a first-level manager rarely interacts with customers below them. You'll have a director interacting with another director, but in many cases, neither director has a good idea what the teams "on the ground" are actually doing, or how heavy the workload is. The individual contributors and first level managers are swamped, but the directors above are either unaware or do not care.
We've had additional engineers on other teams leave last week. While it doesn't directly impact me, fewer staff on these other teams just creates more delays and bottlenecks for downstream teams that are dependent upon systems engineer deliverables and such. If I need a server, I have to have someone on the systems side create a VM for me - if they have fewer staff, everything slows down.
All of accounts payable day-to-day IT support has now been dumped on me with my other teammate's departure. I've kind of been leaning on my third-party reseller/integrator to help out, but the previous vendor support rep turned over about two months ago, and the newest vendor support rep is also leaving that organization. My manager is planning on getting a contractor, but we've typically worked through this vendor for short-term staff augmentation, and obviously they are in no position to help with their own staff exiting. She's looking around to try and get a resource from the actual software vendor, but any help is likely to be weeks away. The only candidate she has for the direct hire job that is open now has no IT experience at all, but we're still going to interview him. That's how desperate we are. We still have a lot of time-consuming year-end processes that are going to have to be done.
I'm not blaming her for the lack of candidates, but part of a manager's role is to ensure adequate staffing levels. If she can't get the staff she needs, she needs to make it clear to her director that her existing staff are stretched to the limit, and empower her to hire. This situation isn't new - we've been behind the eight-ball on staffing since at least early summer.
The older guy that was just promoted was asking me to help him train the newest guy on the ticketing system this morning. This kind of garbage absolutely has to stop - I cannot be supporting all these different applications, then also doing training on how to use a ticketing system.
Manager mentioned to AP management today that I am swamped - not only am I having to take on AP, I still have loose ends from where one guy retired back in September and transitioned things poorly, and all the other software I'm over, which was a full-time job itself. AP can be half of an FTE itself if they are "busy." My whole day has been supporting AP, yet I'm still on call for the surveillance cameras. It makes absolutely no sense.
We recently started getting ticket metrics again. I'm working for two teams out of two different assignment groups, and worked and closed more tickets for each assignment group than any other analyst, each of whom are only working out of one group or the other.
I am creating a list of bullet points for the performance reviews, including the ticket metrics (I am by far the most productive on tickets on either team), big project wins (led multiple seven figure implementations this year), the fact that I am the only analyst that is working either team, and see where that leads. I'm going to ask for the promotion. I've earned it.
If I don't get it, I'm going to look very aggressively. I'm looking for remote work and regionally, and have several promising leads. With that said, going back to full-time in the office would be difficult, and it would need to be a really good fit.
The 1:1 that was supposed to occur in November kept getting deferred, and eventually happened yesterday, along with the annual performance review. I received the highest score on 5/6 graded metrics, "meets expectations" on the last one.
I didn't get the promotion. She said there was no "money in the budget" to do it, yet the 65 year old who has been threatening to retire all year and likes to talk about his health issues was promoted to principal recently. Another person, who has now turned in her notice and is leaving in a couple of weeks, was also promoted to senior earlier in the year. Frankly, it's not about the money at this point, but a recognition for going above and beyond.
I'm taking her response is that "there is no money in the budget for me." These other two people were sort of "squeaky wheels," and because I'm easy to get along with and taking on all sorts of things, I'm given the more difficult tasks, like having to own all this financial software, plus supporting cameras and related items. No one else on either team is having to support both teams. I am not even on-call, and last night, our on-call guy called me for a system I am over that he couldn't figure out, so I'm having to log in and work from 9:30 - 10:30. Honestly, I think the reason I'm not being promoted is that she thinks I won't leave because we get along well personally.
We are supposed to be launching a very large project that is likely going to take until at least Q1 2023 and "resources for the project would be protected," yet more and more new implementations are in the pipeline virtually weekly. I made it clear that I think the 40 hour a week baseline is quickly going to become a 50/60 hour week baseline. She said "that won't happen," but new work is constantly coming in, and the work that the lady who turned in her notice is doing will have to go somewhere. I don't see any way we're going to avoid longer hours and lots of "crunch." She mentioned she wanted to take some things off of my plate, but with a reduction in staff, how is that possible?
I'm also having to train a new hire who is fresh out of college and has never had an IT job before. That's a big time sink in and of itself. I can't be supporting urgent, critical stuff all day long, and spend 2-3 hours a day on the phone training this guy. Also, it's not like we have a pipeline full of good candidates either - virtually everyone who is applying is fresh out of college. We are losing people with ten or more years of experience to retirement, quits, etc., yet all we're attracting, even as a fully remote option, are local kids with a couple years of experience, at most.
Typically, you'd think you'd want to promote your younger, skilled people who have been there, instead of a 65 year old, who complains about his health and may resign at any time because of it.
I've been here for five and a half years. I came in with six years of progressively responsible experience prior to that. That, high review scores, along with everything I'm doing and contributing in ways on both teams that no one else is, ought to be enough for a promotion. Since it's apparently not, I'm going to be looking hard after the holidays to hopefully land something better by spring. I've already begun collecting references from internal customers, and had two first-round interviews yesterday for remote, six-figure jobs.
Take a step back and ask yourself: Has the situation gotten any better? Look at what management does, not what they say.
You are a victim of your own success.
I know the feeling. We had three “teams” of managers with four per team and an equal workload between the teams. Then there were two vacancies that could not be filled because of a hiring freeze during the recession, so the teams were 4/3/3. Increased workload, but doable.
I was on a 3 member team. “Sue” is pulled off “temporarily” to focus 100% on a special important project. This leaves me and one other person-two people doing the work of four. Me and the other person dive in and get the work done. It is brutal but temporary-hey we can manage for a month or two, right? Then the other person on my team gets replaced. Still two doing the work of four. I am the only constant. I keep getting told Sue is coming back “next month” then it is the same story the following month. Meanwhile I (and the other person) are getting pounded with work day after day. Worse, I have 16 direct reports I am spending almost no time with because my day consists of putting out fires with no time to spend with them.
There is no incentive to “fix” this because Sue is coming back and the work is getting done. I was eligible to take early retirement and-twice-ran the numbers and talked to my wife about it. I hung in there. This went on for nearly a year, finally ending when management reorganized and promoted more people.
“Sue” never returned to the role. She was promoted. The special project she was pulled to do was never completed.
Lesson: Don’t accept such treatment. I had 27 years in and should have known better. I kept on with the hard working dedicated employee who never complains when I should have spoke up much earlier.
Take a step back and ask yourself: Has the situation gotten any better? Look at what management does, not what they say.
You are a victim of your own success.
I know the feeling. We had three “teams” of managers with four per team and an equal workload between the teams. Then there were two vacancies that could not be filled because of a hiring freeze during the recession, so the teams were 4/3/3. Increased workload, but doable.
I was on a 3 member team. “Sue” is pulled off “temporarily” to focus 100% on a special important project. This leaves me and one other person-two people doing the work of four. Me and the other person dive in and get the work done. It is brutal but temporary-hey we can manage for a month or two, right? Then the other person on my team gets replaced. Still two doing the work of four. I am the only constant. I keep getting told Sue is coming back “next month” then it is the same story the following month. Meanwhile I (and the other person) are getting pounded with work day after day. Worse, I have 16 direct reports I am spending almost no time with because my day consists of putting out fires with no time to spend with them.
There is no incentive to “fix” this because Sue is coming back and the work is getting done. I was eligible to take early retirement and-twice-ran the numbers and talked to my wife about it. I hung in there. This went on for nearly a year, finally ending when management reorganized and promoted more people.
“Sue” never returned to the role. She was promoted. The special project she was pulled to do was never completed.
Lesson: Don’t accept such treatment. I had 27 years in and should have known better. I kept on with the hard working dedicated employee who never complains when I should have spoke up much earlier.
The situation seems to get worse by the week. There is always more to do, more software coming in, and we've been behind the eight ball on staffing since last year. Someone was furloughed due to COVID, then that person found something else. We brought back someone on another team - she hated the work, and resigned after a few months. Since then, it's been a situation of lose someone, hire someone, but we've always been at least one person down, and the people we are getting (save one) are not experienced enough to do the work without a lot of oversight.
I don't understand their rationale for promotions. We have an older labor force - over half the team is 55+, and most of those are over 60. You would think they would to retain the relatively few younger people they have who have been there awhile. The senior most engineer who left was just a few years older than me. Beyond me, there is no one under 50 that is higher than associate level. They are going to hit the wall on staffing in a few years.
I brought up the lack of professional focus to my manager yesterday. I'm doing everything from financial software, to a meal delivery software system, to surveillance cameras. These things generally don't relate, especially the financial stuff with the "all other." I don't care all that much what I am doing, but I want to be able to focus on one area enough to get very proficient at it. If I'm going to be doing financial software, give the other stuff to someone else. If I need to be on this catch-all bucket, someone else needs to do the financials. No one else is this scattershot.
I'm also very frustrated with the after-hours stuff. Monday was absolute chaos. Yesterday and today have been mostly crickets, save the late night call last night when I'm not even on-call. You'll have days like this where little is going on, then be working late at night.
She seemed very blasé about all the concerns.
Treating people this way is going to send your key people into the market. What I don't understand is my manager knows how difficult it is to recruit candidates now. Why would you antagonize your good people enough to make them want to leave?
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