How to get a job (or not)

[Birdjaguar]

Demonstrable specifics can take you far in and interview.

Candidate: "Let me tell you about the time I was the lead on an expansion project that took two years to complete from concept to planning to implementation." Then they go through some details and the net results of the project on the overall company. Demonstrated knowledge and experience along with the ability to communicate it well.

 

[really]

I've recently been through a competency based interview process for a job in the Irish civil service. I had to demonstrate different areas of competency for example Judgement or Leadership. I had a lot of examples practiced and ready to go.

The suggested method to answer is STAR, Situation Task Action Result.
I went with result result first as if I got interrupted or went off track at least I got the achievement across.

Thankfully I was successful and hope to be starting the new job this spring, it's been a slow process.
Practically it isn't as well paid as I might like but it should be flexible and steady which I want.
This might see me to retirement just 22 to 25 more years to go...

One thing that I saw during my preparation that I will do and try to keep up to date was a skills gap analysis.
You look at the role or type of job you are interested in and look at what the recruiter typically looks for.
The idea is to identify those broad requirements and write out examples under each of what you have done - this keeps our examples fresh and you're less likely to forget them.
It also helps you identify any big gaps, I know you shouldn't wait to satisfy every requirement to go for a job, but say if you feel you are missing something substantial like people management or project management, you can look for other tasks, projects, jobs to allow you to plug this gap.
Keeping track of examples of skills and competences also means you have it to hand and don't have to reinvent the wheel if you want to apply for something, you just have to tailor it for the application.
I had to do it more or less from scratch - if I didn't have so much time to prepare I don't know if I would have done so well.

Edit: It also means I won't be able to comment on politics online anymore.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Edit: It also means I won't be able to comment on politics online anymore.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Would the prohibition include foreign politics too? US? China? Ukraine?

 

[aelf]

I don't see that from the article. Where?

Do these sound like hourly jobs??

Lisa Crawford works in marketing from her home in Phoenix

His responsibilities included setting up training for new employees, coordinating calendar invites for meetings and handling travel vouchers. Some-times there was none of that to do

Anyway, seems like my point has been confirmed.

Recording of time to projects, even for salaried employees, is around for a long time.

 

[really]

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Would the prohibition include foreign politics too? US? China? Ukraine?

I don't know to be honest.
I've been getting more parochial as I get older - I don't post about those much if at all anyways.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@aelf One cannot know whether or not a job is salaried by descriptions of work unless it is a description of Senior Management positions. Different industries have different practices in both how they classify positions and how they monitor folks in-house or remotely. As for the monitoring practices in Eire, they are what they are and likely do not reflect what goes on in other countries let alone US corporations. Maybe there are examples of monitoring salaried workers. idk

 

[aelf]

The denial is strong with this one.

 

[RobAnybody]

Pretty sure that some of those cases mentioned are salaried workers.

I'd be curious [EDIT: things have moved fast! this is about companies tracking employees' work time], just on a personal level, to know if that's really the case. I am salaried, as are most of my close co-workers, & also my immediate management that can direct work. We all (including the aforementioned managers) have affirmed that none of us care how much time we put into work... as long as we get our work done. If you are super efficient & get your assigned work done in 30 hours*, so be it. If it takes you 50 hours* to get your work done, so be it.

* if either is a consistent state, then clearly management needs to juggle workloads of course, but I mean in any given random week

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'd be curious [EDIT: things have moved fast! this is about companies tracking employees' work time], just on a personal level, to know if that's really the case. I am salaried, as are most of my close co-workers, & also my immediate management that can direct work. We all (including the aforementioned managers) have affirmed that none of us care how much time we put into work... as long as we get our work done. If you are super efficient & get your assigned work done in 30 hours*, so be it. If it takes you 50 hours* to get your work done, so be it.

* if either is a consistent state, then clearly management needs to juggle workloads of course, but I mean in any given random week

That is pretty much my experience over the past 35 years. Now WFH may have forced some adjustments, but I doubt there have been wholesale adjustments to change the way salaried workers are monitored. Once I had a terrible boss once who micro managed everyone (150 employees), but to keep anyone working there for any length of time he had to over pay substantially. It was worth if for a while.

 

[Gorbles]

I can guarantee that defending this on the basis of salaried vs. contracted workers (or however we're phrasing "by the hour") is going to backfire when it's eventually normalised for salaried workers. As really even said, it's been a thing for a good long while, even if a bunch of us anecdotally haven't been (that) affected.

It's all about the perception of work done, and that level of trust you (and indeed I) enjoy with our bosses at the moment is no guarantee. The drive is to make more money. This involves at times, as we have plenty of evidence of, both undervaluing workers and placing excessively administrative burdens upon them in addition to the completion of their actual work. Because it takes that work away from another (salaried or contracted) role. Thus saving costs.

It's poor management, in my opinion. Regardless of what this woman did or didn't do, the culture that this software and her management put in place lead to an incident like this being inevitable.

 

[really]

Well the companies I worked for were technology multinationals. I worked on projects across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Those who had to record time were generally say engineers recording hours to projects. Sometimes it was very high level, recording a full day on whatever software product they were working on.
In other cases it was more granular, they had say 39 hours to record and they would allocate those in hourly increments to a customer project - this was more customer facing where we were building and implementing things somewhere and different people worked on it at different times.
I (project/management accountant) and the project manager looked at those in detail. It wasn't unknown for the engineering teams to pad the hours in something that was profitable to make a worse performing project look better. Other times there were terrible projects that got hours dumped in as more loss might not be noticed.
We didn't use software to physically check what people were doing, it depended on self reporting and management review.
Sometimes the hours were wanted by the customer, others there were grants involved and the awarding body wanted to know who exactly was doing what.

We'd occasionally query variances that stood out.
Only once did it cause a problem - someone senior neither I nor the project manager recognised or expected recorded very expensive hours to a project. Younger me probably could have been more tactful but Herr Doktor was highly insulted that I questioned his integrity.

 

[Samson]

I have had to do time tracking by project, but it was completely made up. I THINK it was not corruption or anything, it was two different grants paying for the same science and them juggling how much of our salary comes from which grant. It used to be that every 3 months an admin person would come round with a stack of timesheets for us to sign. Then they changed to excel, and were supposed to manually fill in a certain percentage of time to each project. So we wrote software to fill it in automatically.

 

[aelf]

Yeah, man hour tracking on a project has not much to do with how many hours someone actually works. It certainly does not necessitate surveillance. Sometimes, the man hours are even underestimated on purpose so that the project costs don't balloon. Just capitalism things.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Regardless of what this woman did or didn't do, the culture that this software and her management put in place lead to an incident like this being inevitable.

Don't forget the culture of people lying and cheating to get money for nothing. If people were honest all the time, time cards, and accounting for hours would not be needed. I wonder how many CFC posters over the years, who were paid hourly, posted here while being paid? Employee surveillance is at the intersection of management control issues; employee desire to get paid while not working, company cost cutting/profitability; the expectations of what it means to have a job. The less aligned corporate and employee culture are, the more problems one is likely to see.

How should companies treat employees who cheat on their time?

 

[Samson]

I wonder how many CFC posters over the years, who were paid hourly, posted here while being paid?

You almost seem to be saying this like it is a bad thing?

 

[Birdjaguar]

You almost seem to be saying this like it is a bad thing?

Well, if you had an hourly employee who hung out here while they were on the clock, what would you do? I have always been salaried since I joined CFC, but nonetheless I never logged into the site while working. But keep in mind that I used company supplied desktop computers and never worked off laptops or smart phones. My work day world in business was not like the world of millennials so my perspective is quite different. I was on the management side of things for over 30 years.

 

[Gorbles]

Don't forget the culture of people lying and cheating to get money for nothing.

The "culture", much like the "culture" around benefits "abuse", is grossly overblown.

People do it, yes. Does that make it a culture? And should we extend this correlation to other instances of people doing things?

 

[Samson]

Well, if you had an hourly employee who hung out here while they were on the clock, what would you do?

If I put someone on a computer for 8 hours a day I would fully expect a certain amount of time on places like CFC no matter what sort of payment scheme they were on. I think to expect anything else is not understanding how the human brain works.

 

[Lexicus]

All workers have a duty to work as little as possible while on the clock, doing otherwise means failing to be good "homo economicus".

"Humans are rational utility maximizers - wait, not like that"

 

[Birdjaguar]

The "culture", much like the "culture" around benefits "abuse", is grossly overblown.

People do it, yes. Does that make it a culture? And should we extend this correlation to other instances of people doing things?

If I put someone on a computer for 8 hours a day I would fully expect a certain amount of time on places like CFC no matter what sort of payment scheme they were on. I think to expect anything else is not understanding how the human brain works.

All workers have a duty to work as little as possible while on the clock, doing otherwise means failing to be good "homo economicus".

"Humans are rational utility maximizers - wait, not like that"

One generation speaking to another. Even though we all live at the same time, we live in different worlds. We are transitioning from my world to yours. It can be a bumpy road. You all are re-setting the standards for behavior and practices in the workplace. My views are mostly irrelevant and unlikely to mesh well with those folks in their 30s and 40s. It is your perspective that will create the workplaces for the next 20 years or so. Or, at least until Gen Z tells you all to f'off and throws your ideas into the trash.