Work

[Chest Rockwell]

6 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Oof. It is getting nasty in the workplace. I know I'm lucky to be in work but.. shit's getting desperate and everyone knows it. Management know they can overload you because there's nowhere to go and everyone doing the work is getting cutthroat and/or terrified. The atmosphere just feels really sour and bleak in our company. (Big corporate, for context).

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

[johnnyboy]

1 hour ago, westlondonmist said:

Some people in my team would get around £40k to fuck off, and I think they'd take it if offered, so not surprised they seem less worried. 

Yeah, that's firmly in my wouldn't think twice about taking it wheelhouse.

[johnnyboy]

21 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

That's so grim.  Sorry you've got to go through that.

[SuperBacon]

25 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

Can you programme it to fuck everything up? Or at least build in something that turns a random word into KWESH every time its applied?

That's so shit man, sorry.

[westlondonmist]

50 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

What the fuck? 

[deathrey]

2 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

I'm so sorry mate, that really is the shittest

[hallicks]

8 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I've now been added to a working group to build the robot that's going to take my job. Bon weekend, peeps!

That’s fucking shite, sorry to hear. What kind of robot? A chatbot or some kind of manufacturing dealio? 

[SuperBacon]

Got an invite to an interview on Friday afternoon. No mention of a date or a time, just log in and pick a time on the candidate portal. Tried all weekend, but there is nowhere that has any information of the interview, the date or time. 

Email their HR department and explain and hear back at 12.30 today explaining the interviews are today, so one day notice, and the only slot left is 1.30pm, which I can't make at an hours notice.

And employers wonder why they can't fill their fucking positions. 

[Slapnut]

On 8/5/2026 at 12:42 PM, Slapnut said:

I switched jobs last week. Same job as my last one but with a competitor, a bit more pay, better hours, more annual leave, and generally just a smaller company who seem relaxed as fuck and aren't bothered if you leave early to catch your train etc. Most importantly, there are no immature dickheads talking about poo and cum all day. It was an absolute no brainer to take the job.

Cont'd....

Been here for almost 3 months now and whilst I'm generally pretty happy with a number of things, there are certain elements that I'm not happy with and making me feel like a bit of an idiot.

I feel like I'm making a lot of mistakes, but I think they're largely the result of things not being explained to me clearly. It's a very small company - about 15 staff in total - and I think they take for granted that I'll know things that I don't.

I don't have a manager per se (which is weird, I know) but I work closely with the tech lead who is very good at her job and a wealth of knowledge, but is incredibly poor at explaining things and can be super vague when asking for things to be done.

As an example, she was on annual leave at the end of last week and in her handover asked for a piece of work to be done "if it comes in". This isn't a piece of work I'm familiar with and she'd already left before sending her handover, but I figured I'd give it a go if it came in and put out a call for help if needed. Anyway, as far as I could tell, the work never arrived.

Upon her return this morning she was asking why this piece of work wasn't done in such vague terms that it genuinely took me a few minutes to figure out what she was talking about. Anyway, as it turns out, the piece of work did come in, but I wasn't included in the email chain and nobody forwarded it to me. She was in a huff for about two hours after and I still don't know if I've fucked up or if she's being a bit unreasonable and it makes me feel like shit.

The other thing that was flagged to me this morning - and I'll hold my hands up and say in hindsight I should have been a bit more cautious here - but on Friday the big boss asked for a password to a machine in the group chat, which I gave him. Apparently this was a big fucking no no and now they have to change all the passwords.

To clarify, I know under most circumstances you shouldn't be sharing passwords in group chats, but this particular password is used to unlock every single computer in the entire company, not just one specific computer that contains sensitive material. We give it to clients all the time. Also, it's such a pathetically weak password that if it were my UKFF password it would be S1apnut. My point being nobody has ever explicitly told me not to put that password in the group chat, especially when the big boss asks for it, but I do feel like a bit of an idiot in hindsight for not at least questioning whether I should post it, and makes me wonder if I should have used a bit more common sense in the first example.

I also constantly feel like everybody else has their own little project, but my only work comes from when people ask me to do something. I hardly ever come into work having work there waiting for me, I'm always having to ask others if they need help with anything, and I feel like a bit of a spare part. It means I spend a fair chunk of time doing fuck all which I'm worried makes me look like a lazy bastard, especially when it turns out work hasn't been completed.

Apologies for the mildly coherent ramblings. I've been stewing on this all day and feeling proper down about it. I was always considered one of the better staff members at my last place - people frequently told me they were relieved to see my name on a piece of work - so I'm just quite down about it all.

[westlondonmist]

1 hour ago, Slapnut said:

Been here for almost 3 months now and whilst I'm generally pretty happy with a number of things, there are certain elements that I'm not happy with and making me feel like a bit of an idiot.

I feel like I'm making a lot of mistakes, but I think they're largely the result of things not being explained to me clearly. It's a very small company - about 15 staff in total - and I think they take for granted that I'll know things that I don't.

I don't have a manager per se (which is weird, I know) but I work closely with the tech lead who is very good at her job and a wealth of knowledge, but is incredibly poor at explaining things and can be super vague when asking for things to be done.

As an example, she was on annual leave at the end of last week and in her handover asked for a piece of work to be done "if it comes in". This isn't a piece of work I'm familiar with and she'd already left before sending her handover, but I figured I'd give it a go if it came in and put out a call for help if needed. Anyway, as far as I could tell, the work never arrived.

Upon her return this morning she was asking why this piece of work wasn't done in such vague terms that it genuinely took me a few minutes to figure out what she was talking about. Anyway, as it turns out, the piece of work did come in, but I wasn't included in the email chain and nobody forwarded it to me. She was in a huff for about two hours after and I still don't know if I've fucked up or if she's being a bit unreasonable and it makes me feel like shit.

The other thing that was flagged to me this morning - and I'll hold my hands up and say in hindsight I should have been a bit more cautious here - but on Friday the big boss asked for a password to a machine in the group chat, which I gave him. Apparently this was a big fucking no no and now they have to change all the passwords.

To clarify, I know under most circumstances you shouldn't be sharing passwords in group chats, but this particular password is used to unlock every single computer in the entire company, not just one specific computer that contains sensitive material. We give it to clients all the time. Also, it's such a pathetically weak password that if it were my UKFF password it would be S1apnut. My point being nobody has ever explicitly told me not to put that password in the group chat, especially when the big boss asks for it, but I do feel like a bit of an idiot in hindsight for not at least questioning whether I should post it, and makes me wonder if I should have used a bit more common sense in the first example.

I also constantly feel like everybody else has their own little project, but my only work comes from when people ask me to do something. I hardly ever come into work having work there waiting for me, I'm always having to ask others if they need help with anything, and I feel like a bit of a spare part. It means I spend a fair chunk of time doing fuck all which I'm worried makes me look like a lazy bastard, especially when it turns out work hasn't been completed.

Apologies for the mildly coherent ramblings. I've been stewing on this all day and feeling proper down about it. I was always considered one of the better staff members at my last place - people frequently told me they were relieved to see my name on a piece of work - so I'm just quite down about it all.

I've worked at places that you don't have a clear line manager, and it can be achingly frustrating. 

Sounds like she's probably fucked off in general rather than at you, either it was supposed to be sent to you or forwarded to you and the relevant person did neither. I'd probably just offer to support to make sure it's done asap. 

For a while people at my work talk about these projects that they are working on. I actually realised they aren't working on any projects, it just seems to be a word people use when they are doing work but want to make it sound more interesting or bigger than what they actually do. Even if they are working on actual projects, I've found many of them struggle with actual day to day reactive work, which I mainly deal with and it sounds like you do and it's a skill in it's own right.

[BomberPat]

my manager's sick leave was extended for another week. So that's coming up on three months that I've had functionally no management whatsoever.

The worst chunk of work at the start of the month is out of the way, so it's not as overwhelming as it was. But we're coming up on round two of that for November's payment, and it's looking increasingly like she won't be around for that either. I have made it very clear that I'm not doing it again. At some point you would think that how obviously short-staffed and overwhelmed we are would break through and mean something to someone outside of our team, but we get more and more piled on me.

In our last meeting with someone in senior management, I said that we as a team are receiving far too many emails from people who seemingly don't know what our role and remit is but should know better, and that I personally am getting far too many emails specifically to my personal account assuming that I'm either more senior than I am or in a position to fix all of their problems, when they should at the very least be contacting our team inbox. The main culprit has now taken to copying in two other members of my team, and everyone else he can think of, saying "I think X is responsible for this" when they're not even remotely associated with that piece of work and God only knows how they got that idea. We were told before the start of term that we would be given a standard automatic response redirecting people from our personal inboxes to the team one, and the team one would have an auto-response with links and replies to common enquiries - none of that has happened, and in fact things have only got worse. 

Meanwhile, on the academic side of things, the union have been taking industrial action since August. Good on them. The last offer from management was offering to open a voluntary redundancy scheme, with a commitment to no more compulsory redundancies this year - that has had the opposite effect to that which they presumably expected, as all it did was highlight that currently the plan is for compulsory redundancies this year, something they had been skirting around actually saying. And as for voluntary redundancy, it will be the third such scheme in eighteen months - at some point you have to assume that everyone who could be eligible for it already has been; if it comes up again and apply for it and it's granted, I would have to seriously ask what's changed so much to have made me disposable now when I was turned down for the same scheme four months ago.

[BomberPat]

aaaand on top of all of that, I got an email at 4.30 yesterday that absolutely ruined my day, made me so angry and so stressed about the response I was going to have to write to it today, and about every single conversation I would have to have today, that I barely slept last night.

It was someone in a senior management position basically saying, "this huge piece of work urgently needs doing, and after a conversation with X and Y it's been decided that you are going to support this work". A conversation I wasn't in, where it was decided that I would be doing this work. This super-urgent, business critical work. Followed up with usual platitudes of "I know that everybody is at capacity right now, but please find the time for this" - if we're at capacity, where do you think I'm finding this time, exactly? If I'm leaving other work undone to get to this, are you going to reach out to all the people not having their requests answered and explain to them that you have told me that they're not as important?

The email ended with the suggestion that I speak to X about how to manage this workload. X, who couldn't be bothered to so much as send me a message giving me the heads-up about this, didn't involve me in the conversation he was going to put me forward to do a massive piece of work above my pay grade in, and now I'm expected to even take the lead on a "conversation" with him about the work he's asking me to do? Fuck off.

So I've responded to this morning. Firstly, I've pointed out that if this work was so business-critical, the person sending the email probably shouldn't have signed off on voluntary severance for the one person in the entire university with any knowledge or experience of how it worked. I've also pointed out that if it's so urgent and critical that we start this work immediately, it's probably a stupid allocation of time to, as they have, immediately arrange two separate meetings about it on a day that we already have multiple meetings in the calendar, so I'm effectively out of action from 12 until 5. Then I've added that I'm on annual leave from Friday, and that if anyone had actually bothered to ask I could have told them that.

More significantly, I've laid out a timeline of events from April of this year, in which promises have been made to our team that the university has completely failed to meet, in which I arranged a meeting back in August to lay out all the ways I could already tell we were going to be let down this year, and how important it would be to actually set and maintain clear boundaries about what work we were prepared to pick up - within that meeting, it was agreed that a large part of the work I perform does not appropriately sit within our team, and it was also agreed that X, the same prick putting me forward for this work now, would draft an email to go out to all heads of departments clarifying our role, and create accompanying automatic responses for our team inbox detailing this, and for our personal inboxes redirecting people to email our team inbox rather than individuals. The report produced from that meeting has not been acted on, and none of the things X was supposed to have done got done.

Also in that timeline is the fact that I have had no line management since August. So not only did I have to pick up a shit-ton of work above my pay grade, in the subject area that was already agreed to be outside of our remit, but I've had to figure out that entire process and get it all done off my own back with no support, no steer, no management oversight whatsoever. As a result of that, the head of that subject area started emailing me relentlessly because he figured I was now working exclusively for him and was the person who could fix every problem under the sun for him - something that he should already know isn't the case, but certainly would know if the guidance X had promised had ever actually been delivered.

So, with no other option, I took it upon myself to explain the situation and lay out boundaries - I did this work once because it needed doing and there was no alternative, but this is Grade 7 work and I am Grade 5, it is not reasonable to expect me to pick it up in perpetuity, and I have no intention of doing so. I copied X in on this email for visibility, and on Monday explained exactly why I had copied in on that email.

So in my email to everybody involved today, I have said how disappointed I am not only that my email wasn't supported by management - despite it being clearly within the structure they laid out for how our team would operate this year - but that the one person I should be able to trust to back me up on it has actively undermined me on it instead, by telling me that they expect me to pick up another massive piece of work in the same subject area, above my pay grade.


I've ended by saying that this is, at minimum, a full month of doing Grade 7 work at a Grade 5 salary, and that this is neither appropriate, sustainable, or within the university's guidelines for appropriate cover for absent colleagues, and have said that in the absence of a satisfactory response I have no interest in continuing that conversation without a union representative present. As shit as this job has been at times, I've always been able to fall back on having a good team around me, but it turns out at least one of them is a careerist backstabbing cunt who would rather promise the bosses the world than look out for his colleagues, and I'm not going to stand for him thinking he can use me as a pawn in that game - I've copied every other member of our team in this email, so they can all see what's being asked of me, and who's doing the asking. Prick.

[deathrey]

@BomberPat I can literally feel the stress you are under in what you have written here. I hope that someone at work picks up on it and does the right thing. I'm so sorry you are in this shit situation again and you even predicted it would happen. I think involving everyone and being transparent was the right thing to do and it's absolutely time to involve the union. 

[SuperBacon]

23 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I've ended by saying that this is, at minimum, a full month of doing Grade 7 work at a Grade 5 salary

This is the crux, and there is no way they will sign off on a month's work at that level/salary, so if they want you to do it, then they'll have to offer a secondment (which they won't) or a promotion. Or find someone at that level to actually do the work (I'm sure you're more than capable by the way)

It's quite mental that organisations expect you to do this type of thing all the time. In a crude analogy, which may not work, its like asking someone who's line prep in a kitchen to be a sous chef for a month. It's pathetic. Solidarity with you brother.

[BomberPat]

it doesn't look like there's any hope of someone else picking up the work, but the mention of getting the union involved seems to have ruffled the right amount of feathers.

We have a weekly meeting with the member of SMT that in theory has oversight of our team - I don't trust him, and I've yet to see any tangible benefit from these meetings. Last week he didn't show up, and only apologised after the fact, this week he didn't show up and sent a replacement, which we only found out when said replacement joined the meeting. Whenever I next see him, I intend to tell him how disrespectful of our time I find this - it's fair enough that he can't always be available, but give us the courtesy of telling us ahead of time when that's the case!

The person sent in his stead is one of the Deans of Faculty, who I have a lot more time for than the usual guy. He was a lot more receptive, admitted a lot of things that were at fault, and sounded a lot more committed to making sure our workload is better managed and other departments are expected to better pull their weight - whether anything comes of it remains to be seen, but it was reassuring to hear, at least. I didn't bring up my email, but a colleague did - not one I would have expected to have spoken up in my favour - and the Dean said that the email had been forwarded to him, and that he was planning to talk with management about making sure I was fairly compensated for the additional work I have been having to do.

That addresses part of my email, it doesn't address the lack of management or respect of boundaries - there was one point in the meeting, before my email had been mentioned, when he said something about making sure that our team aren't asked to do anything that's outside of our remit, and I just involuntarily let out a short laugh, given that the person who has volunteered me for work outside of my job description is in my team and was in the meeting. The call is coming from inside the house! At least it's something, though, but it's something I am going to follow up on repeatedly until I get something in writing to say that I will be getting paid at a Grade 7 rate.

 

What's frustrating is that I have had opportunities to apply for Grade 7 jobs in the past, and I have always been very clear that I wasn't interested - I don't want that level of responsibility, I find the work too stressful, and I'm happy with the work/life balance that my current grade affords me, and, thankfully, I'm in a position where I'm not desperate for the additional money. I'm confident that had I applied for those roles when they were available, I would have had a decent shot at getting them. Doing that work but not getting that money is, obviously, the absolute worst of both worlds. My preference would have been not doing this work at all, if I had to choose between that and doing it while also having to fight to be paid fairly for it.