Long post alert, with some rant!
Not sure if this is the right section to post, but since this post is not about actual job openings nor I am seeking for opportunities. Most people hang out here anyway, I give it a try... I am curious about your opinion.
The professional part:
I work for medium-large company with ~1000 employees, we produce industrial measuring equipments for a specific sector. I work here for more than 8 years, started as a service engineer, but I am a Product Manager now. While true that I am responsible for a certain product family, but -despite the size of the company- I am my own Product Engineer, even further I am also the chief development engineer of this tool right now. The reason for this is that I worked my entire career working around this particular instrument, and the tool and metrology is rather complex, the main unit consist of about 3500 electronic components, and the other development engineers within the company always try to keep a distance of this product due to its complexity, while the only more experienced engineer than me retired a few years ago.
Among all I am most proud of my senior development engineer title (even though this is the lowest rank of my other titles), this is the part of my job which I love the most. But since I have other responsibilities I only develop PCBs those require some specific knowledge on its target application. Of course I work within a larger group which is responsible for more product lines, and if there is some "hard to do" or "critical" new development requests usually I am the guy who gets it done right. All in all I only make 3-4 new PCBs a year, which is not much to be honest, compared to full profile development engineers, what I do are mission critical analog circuits mostly, with some simple microcontrollers, generally everything between low-noise, high stability to 500 MHz. I am very familiar with both Altium and Mentor PADS. I do circuit simulation both in MicroCap and TINA.
The personal part:
I also have a wife and thee sons (2-4-7 yo.), and while my main hobby interest is also electronics, still raising the kids and "keeping the family running" is by far the highest priority. I am not living for work, but work for a living. As the school starts for our biggest son this autumn we face some some change in our life in terms of managing the logistics of the kids.
At work we have to work for 8:30 (lunch included), but there is some flexibility in workhours on monthly basis, with daily core time-frame, also I have a possibility for 4 days of Home Office per month.
The Problem:
I asked whether it is possible to change my work time schedule for 7:30 in-office and + 1 hour home office per day, fixed. Because with my wife we found out this would greatly ease our logistics problems with the kids. Needless to say this was declined by the HR, stating if they make any exception with me, then every other employees would want a "custom" work schedule, instead they adviced a so-they-say constructive idea to simply shift 1-1 hours for three days, then work off at the rest 2 days, which is simply ridiculous... This talk happened yesterday, today I was not even in work (wedding annyversary), yet I am still very pissed off about this, especially by their counter offer.
What to do?
I think my request was not very extraordinary, and I am pretty sure I can find a new job easily where they would be happy to fulfill this request.
In fact I am still so pissed off that I strongly consider to change job, just because of this, even though I am
rather satisfied with the other aspects of my current job.
If I would resign, for sure they would have a very hard time get a substitute for all my experience (BTW my notice period is 3 months... :/)
I also have a vague feeling that by only mentioning to them that it is perhaps time for me to look for a new job, either by bluffing or with a real offer in my hand, could make miracles with my request. What I fear with playing this card out is that I don't want to abuse our mutual loyality with my direct boss, who is a super nice guy...
