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[wombat]

Will they let you use that information for your own purposes? Like if you wanted to do a blog or a podcast or write articles or offer tours - something creative of your own?

[pmcd9]

For instance there's a very fancy area of Brooklyn near the waterfront (I forget which area it was, maybe Cobble Hill?) that used to be the most heavily Puerto Rican part of the city because... that's where the boat from Puerto Rico docked back in the day.

Ah yes, so that's where the Sharks are...

[wombat]

peak 2018: A moment of excitement at discovering that Eric Idle is on Twitter, instantly dashed when it turns out he's tweeting almost exclusively about the shitstorms that are the current British and US political situations.

[Carlos del Vaca]

peak 2018: A moment of excitement at discovering that Eric Idle is on Twitter, instantly dashed when it turns out he's tweeting almost exclusively about the shitstorms that are the current British and US political situations.

John Cleese very much same. Gets in arguments with nobody shit-talkers. I should probably unfollow him.

[theinevitable]

Bad news, my first impression was correct. Had a second  meeting and the other boss just listed all the ways my work isn’t good enough and reiterated that i should look at the brooklyn job. You’d think if your employee was not performing you’d mention it before 2 years passed. I’m mad as hell.

[wombat]

How are there two bosses saying such different things? Not sure how playing Good Boss Bad Boss is a useful strategy. Is one more important/influential than the other?

[theinevitable]

No, i think Nice Boss was trying to give me a gentle nudge and i didn’t react how he wanted and so now he has called in the Blunt Boss. They were both there and now it’s all clear. I’ve done a shitty job and they waited until i was done with all the repetitive shit they wanted me to do to tell me. Now I’m a surplus person with no clear place in the division. I guess I should have seen this coming, I definitely sensed I was not doing an amazing job and was not sufficiently a quant person. But my yearly review gave me the sense I was doing better than I thought.

I will think about this as an opportunity tomorrow, today I’m just pissed. They clearly both think of math/analysis/project organization as something you either have or you don’t. Not interested in keeping someone on who is “learning” to be better at those things.

I think there is potentially also a thing going on where I am very self critical, and then I know I’m very self-critical and so I convince myself it isn’t really true. But maybe it was true and I did awful work at my job this whole time and should have seen the writing on the wall. Distracted, slow, unorganized, “didn’t show initiative.”

[wombat]

Ugh. Sorry. But better to find this out now instead of them dragging it out even longer.
And I think it's not worth it to keep beating your head against something that you're not good at (say, math) and trying to fit your round peg into their square hole, rather than finding a place that appreciates what you are good at. If there's one thing my work experience has demonstrated, it's that you can be exactly the same person with exactly the same skills and personality in two different places and in one you're a problem while in the other you're god's gift to the organization.

[pmcd9]

FWIW, isn't Brooklyn the place to be these days?

[theinevitable]

Jeez, still really mad about this. It is humiliating to admit in retrospect but I got so damn PUMPED about my project ideas. I really thought I had some ways to make our work better and get rid of the mind-numbingly repetitive parts. We should not be getting paid unionized city employee salaries to individually check cells in excel sheets, we should be using modern tools to automate this shit. Copying and pasting excel formulas from a word document is evidence you're doing something that can be done in a better way.

(Damn I have gotten so good at excel though... today they gave me a really weird file and i just figured the FUCK out of these weird labeling errors and geographic mismatch issues)

But I guess then the issue would be... OK Dan, you have automated yourself out of half your job, and do not have the chops to do anything further. Also, why didn't you SHOW INITIATIVE and work on this a year ago.

And beyond that, what's that saying about trusting people when they show you who they are? Ready to move on to greener pastures, although not sure if the Brooklyn opening is what I want. It seems like at least half rubber-stamping fancy condo buildings. I guess I can live with that as long as my assignment was to an already-fancy neighborhood.

My coworker (who transferred to another section to get away from this kind of passive-aggressive shit show) asked, none of this came up on your yearly review?? And she's right, it didn't. Something-- fiscal stuff?-- changed and suddenly they have all these issues with my work.

[AugustWest]

My coworker (who transferred to another section to get away from this kind of passive-aggressive shit show) asked, none of this came up on your yearly review?? And she's right, it didn't. Something-- fiscal stuff?-- changed and suddenly they have all these issues with my work.

Which is why you shouldn't let this sort of thing affect you too much, self-imagewise.

[wombat]

I feel like "Show initiative" is, like, always a trick question. I have had more than one job where they hated it when I "showed initiative." It's definitely not always a positive. And if like you said, everything was fine at your yearly review and something else changed that isn't about you and they're looking for a way to say that now you are a problem, "show initiative" is a good one to pick on because it's so amorphous, there's no way to define the right degree of it or whether you are showing it about what they think are the right things.

[theinevitable]

Went on vacation, and, of course, got sick the first day. Tried very hard not to ruin it for the GF but obviously someone who wants to sleep and not sit on the hot beach was a bit of a drag. Ugh.

Maine is very good. Not excited to go back to work.

[theinevitable]

My boss made a weird statement as I was leaving work on friday-- "you know this is all about the civil service rules, right? do you get that?"-- I was taken aback and said I had some questions but would ask him when I got back in town. Now we spoke and I still don't really get it. Because the system makes no logical sense and he kept giving me meandering answers. I'm sure the civil service system is the way it is as a result of a bunch of changes that made sense at the time, but "we offer a test at random intervals and then only people who take the test can have job security, and the test applies to a bunch of really different jobs that have the same official title for no reason" is hard to justify.

But, basically, the story is that because of the way I was hired I am "provisional," and at my 2 year anniversary I have to be reviewed in some way. They have to make an argument that even though I am "provisional" they should not hire one of the high-scoring people they "should have" hired because I am so necessary and skilled especially for this position. So, because I am not some specially skilled uber-mathematician, I am "vulnerable" to being replaced by someone with a higher civil service test score than me. I tried to ask how transferring me to another division would solve this and he went on, again, about how he wants me to be happy and productive at work. Not helpful. So I am requesting to speak to an HR person soon.

(I have confirmed the rough outline of how the civil service system works with other people at work-- kind of funny that nobody mentioned I was provisional and had no job security when they were bringing me on...)

Of course, we have no competent HR people, because the city hiring process takes months and any competent, intelligent person with other options would not put up with that. Right now the HR department is running on about half the staff it should be for this reason.


Mostly I'm mad that, for some reason, when confronted with the boss himself I just silently nod and say "ok" and cannot summon the energy or clarity of thought to express myself. It's like all of my thoughts turn to soup and I can't even absorb what he's saying to me. This makes it feel like this situation is all pretty clearly my fault. If I had said, "no, it isn't that I dislike this kind of analytical work, it's that you have been giving me data entry and formatting tasks that require no intelligence or insight. When you give me things to do like [particular projects I've worked on] I find it interesting and engaging" this would be a different situation. But as soon as I'm face to face with him I feel both overwhelmed and "why would I give these pricks the satisfaction of seeming like I want this job."

He keeps repeating that I need to figure out what I really want to do. But the answer, really, is "this but better." I want to use data to understand cities and make them work better. I do not want to do what he has described my future in the division as-- double-checking excel sheets.

Been a while since an inev freakout, huh

[theinevitable]

Hm. There is a job opening in the department I'm totally unqualified for... that I would be qualified for if I'd kept doing programming stuff consistently instead of stopping for 2 years. This is, at least, an insight about what stuff I need to learn. I'm going to speak to the woman who is heading up this new subsection-- "data engineering." Although this is more about processing data and getting it to the people who need it, less about using the data to do cool stuff. But at least skill and resume building, unlike data entry.