Thursday, September 18, 2014

Email chains

Whenever my manager or anyone sends me an email that effectively asks me to forward it to someone else to ask a question, I usually remove any reference to that part of the chain mail before sending the email forward. Apparently, not everyone does.

So here's what happened to C, a friend:

X needed some data from C, so she sent Y to ask C for said data.
C needed more information on why this data was needed, so she sent X an email asking for said information before she could provide the data.
X forwarded this email to her manager, Z, with the comment "OMG this is so frustrating why can't we get anything done?"
How do I know this? Because Z forwarded the email from X, without bothering to remove the comment above, back to C, asking for the same data, without adding any new information.

If you can make sense of this, good on you.

I don't understand people.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Overtime

Back in the days when I used to be a consultant, I used to run assessment centers for a client that was the BPO for an American company, and so most of their employees worked evening or night shifts. So my centers would be scheduled to run till 10 or 11 PM, but of course would more often than not end up going on till 1 or 2 AM. Because when has an assessment center ever run exactly as scheduled?

The cab agency my firm used to use had a couple of drivers we trusted more than others, so when it came to these super late nights, we'd ask them to come pick us up, especially I was going home by myself. One night, while driving me home, Kishan Bhaiya suddenly asked me if I was paid overtime for these long days, and was utterly outraged when I said I wasn't.

"Aap toh subah subah office aa jaate ho, aur phir puri raat yaha pe hote ho. Humein toh raat ko gaadi chalane ke liye overtime milta hain, app logo ko milta hai ki nahi? Milna chahiye."

Last night, I told my mother I'm wouldn't be home before 10 PM all of this week, because there were work events I had to attend - this time as a client. Her second question - the first, of course, being about what I would be doing for dinner - was if I would be paid overtime.

Wut.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Where I take stock, a year into the job

When I started this job, one week short of a year ago, I came into a role that had just been created, because a need was felt for a focus on the area I would be responsible for. In the year since, I've felt extremely frustrated at how little progress I feel I've made, simply because this role is like that - there's very little data available, the key stakeholders who need to do stuff to start providing data aren't willing to do anything, and a variety of reasons that I can only be vague about, and therefore will not talk about.

The manager who hired me tells me I've contributed a fair amount, even if I don't feel that way, because there was literally nothing when I came on board, and I've managed to create some dashboards and build some visibility for my area. I'm not sure the manager I'm now under sees things the same way, since he wasn't around when there really was nothing, and so I'm not sure he sees the value of my role the way the previous manager does.

I'm moving into a new role in the next couple of weeks. I knew I wasn't going to grow much in this role, and I wanted to try other things, and so I went and networked and interviewed and got another job. Same company, entirely different group and role. So I'm in that weird transition phase where I'm doing my old job, but also beginning to have meetings for the new job; learning what my new job will be, and also put together transition documents for whoever replaces me.

I was chatting with my current manager this morning, and among other things, we talked about the transition. My current team has someone new joining in a couple of weeks, so I asked if she would be taking over my role. Her response left me more than a little stunned.
I'm not sure, to be honest. Your role is so vague and ambiguous, and there's so little to work with - I'm not sure I want that to be the first impression a new employee gets. 
Given that things are actually much better now than they were when I joined, wtf do you think I went through? And is this actually something to be taken into consideration when you assign roles and responsibilities?

And if this becomes the reason this current role ends up vanishing again, it's going be a great pity, as far as I'm concerned.