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| How to deal with manipulative coworker |
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| rstofer:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 22, 2022, 03:40:19 pm --- --- Quote from: nctnico on September 22, 2022, 01:03:15 pm ---And even then management can decide to make the company less dependant on a single person. --- End quote --- Any company should already be doing this. No matter how valuable, critical, and irreplaceable I am as an employee, and no matter how well I am treated, I can always be hit by a truck. --- End quote --- And that's why companies have 'key person' insurance on their most important employees. It's payable on the death of a key person, not just when they walk out. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keypersoninsurance.asp |
| fourfathom:
--- Quote from: mrbrown on September 23, 2022, 12:01:04 pm ---After 5 years of doing the same job it's never a bad idea to find something new, meet some new people to learn from, learn some new skills, regain motivation. --- End quote --- I agree, at least if you're not wildly enthusiastic about your current job. I wasn't a job-hopper by any means, but several times around the 4-5 year point I would finally take a long vacation, and when I got back I would think "I don't need this shit!", find a new job, and then hand in my two-week notice (note the order in which I did this). I've talked elsewhere about companies accumulating deadwood employees, and sometimes if the company environment was becoming bad I would start to feel like deadwood myself. This isn't good for anyone. Engineering wasn't merely a job for me, it's who I am, and I need a challenge to be at my best. I've been retired for over twenty years now (retired at age 45) but I still feel like this -- only now I find my own challenges. |
| tszaboo:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 23, 2022, 03:26:15 pm --- --- Quote from: mrbrown on September 23, 2022, 12:01:04 pm ---After 5 years of doing the same job it's never a bad idea to find something new, meet some new people to learn from, learn some new skills, regain motivation. --- End quote --- I agree, at least if you're not wildly enthusiastic about your current job. I wasn't a job-hopper by any means, but several times around the 4-5 year point I would finally take a long vacation, and when I got back I would think "I don't need this shit!", find a new job, and then hand in my two-week notice (note the order in which I did this). I've talked elsewhere about companies accumulating deadwood employees, and sometimes if the company environment was becoming bad I would start to feel like deadwood myself. This isn't good for anyone. Engineering wasn't merely a job for me, it's who I am, and I need a challenge to be at my best. I've been retired for over twenty years now (retired at age 45) but I still feel like this -- only now I find my own challenges. --- End quote --- It's surprising to me how predictable it is that a company with bad management and company culture can poison it's environment and turn it into an ever replicating status quo. The energy was very different when I joined here. And then with a few key people replaced, they just started accumulating people with horrible personalities. The good employees left, and the people who didn't care (including myself) and bad attitude stayed. I could pinpoint it in time, exactly, when this started happening. I've also been at companies, where this has already happened. And bad managers are going to promote same-minded people. And encourage this sort of back channel communication. Or hiring/promoting people who are completely unqualified for the jobs. --- Quote from: mrbrown on September 23, 2022, 12:01:04 pm ---I know it's hard to leave your comfort zone, but just go find a new job, that shouldn't be too difficult these days for anyone in your line of work. After 5 years of doing the same job it's never a bad idea to find something new, meet some new people to learn from, learn some new skills, regain motivation. Stick your energy in something positive, way more rewarding. --- End quote --- Not just that, but it's good also career-wise. People who switch jobs every few years statistically end up with much higher salaries after a decade or two. |
| fourfathom:
The first time I quit in anger was when they replaced my manager with a guy who was technically incompetent and "fixed" my designs behind my back. I had a simple NPN saturated switch in a low-voltage power circuit (It might have been using a single 1.2V NiCd battery, don't recall) and he explained to me how that couldn't possibly work. "You see", he explained, "a transistor is really two back-to-back diodes, so the collector voltage can never be less than the base voltage." I tried to explain how a transistor can operate when saturated, even demonstrating it on the bench. He protested that I was "pulling the ground up." There were many other examples of this behavior, such as when I was having a custom transducer made. My boss had not one clue about the difference between closed-loop and open-loop output impedance of an amplifier. I was going for maximum power transfer and he changed the transducer spec to match the (extremely low) closed-loop impedance. When the transducers were delivered they obviously didn't work very well, and that's when I discovered that he had changed the spec before it went out. He wasn't a bad person, but he had no business second-guessing anyone else's design. The company wasn't going to get rid of him, and other indicators were not good, so I quit. It was a good move. |
| Psi:
--- Quote from: nctnico on September 22, 2022, 01:03:15 pm ---Sending a letter to a CEO is counterproductive and results in people having a negative vibe about you. The notion of keeping YOU on board as something that is important to the company should come from other people, not yourself. And even then management can decide to make the company less dependant on a single person. --- End quote --- I think this may differ by country. I suspect employees communicating with the CEO or upper management is just never done in some countries, eg America? In some parts of the world is more normal when you have a serious problem and it's not getting any attention. They welcome occasional emails on important issues employees may have. Of course if you go to the CEO with something stupid or you're a Karren then you face the consequences. |
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