So I found out that my company has been intentionally vague about parental leave for fathers for a reason: there is none. Joan doesn't care about things like that normally but she is hormonal now and cries for no reason, or gets angry for no reason, and gets angry if there is a reason so she got angry. I am trying to explain to her that my taking a job that pays $40K less still makes sense for reasons, but I didn't put a lot of time into the discussion as she was pissed off.
One thing I know is that I do not want to have debt over my head. We are debt free and saving money, and have enough for a down payment as well as a healthy nest egg for pension. We have never been a "keeping up with the Joneses" type couple, so I want to redouble my efforts to explain why keeping this job is a good idea for now.
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I think if I had to go to work in a smallish company I would flip out. The story of the guy saying "we did it this way at my old company" drives me crazy both ways: either his criticism is apt, which I doubt, and there are obvious improvements and that happens.... OR... it doesn't make any difference and he should shut up and work.
I get this look on my face when people suggest shitty options for managing things, and people recognize it and start stammering. Even though it's a natural asset, it's possibly my greatest one.
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Here's a story. I'll try to making it unboring and brief as possible but I don't think I will succeed:
Most of my job consists in trying to mind-meld with technical guys who are having problems that they can barely express in any language... and figure out if I can help them, or who I have to alert or escalate to.
The way it works at my business, metaphorically, is that my group builds the foundation for some work... and an internal group (we call them internal customers) put a building on the foundation. They just brought in a new manager for the internal customers, and he seems very slick, very talky, well-dressed but incompetent. His first move was to call for a weekly 1.5 hour meeting with me and my three technical leads EVERY Monday to "coordinate" between the groups.
Now, the thing is that yes - SOME coordination is necessary.... MAYBE. To continue with the metaphor of building: we say we are preparing the concrete for the pouring foundation on Feb 1, and we have explained that it will be this long and this wide, and the internal customers can build your building on it 3 days after the pour, for the concrete to dry.
So, for coordination... maybe their engineers may come back and need to meet with us occasionally with questions we didn't anticipate like "what kind of concrete is it ?" "you said it could hold this weight but what about temperature fluctuation" "what if we need to poke some iron beams into it as it dries" etc. Unanticipated things and new questions that come up. So, yes, maybe. But NOT 1.5 hours EVERY MONDAY with Five of us. That's 7.5 man-hours or one day.
But... fine... the new incompetent guy is new so maybe we can just do it a few times then he'll figure out after awhile that we are wasting time with those meetings and drop them to monthly or whatever. With that in mind, and generally trying to work with him, we met the last two Mondays to "coordinate" BUT the meetings were all about their internal planning, with my most productive team members just sitting there listening. Our stuff barely came up, and when it did they just asked us about our promised delivery dates which are already published and known. It was a good thing my guys brought their laptops and were tapping away the whole time.
So it made zero sense to meet and most people at this level know better than to call useless meetings, but there's more: we had to listen to him talking to his own guys in the room, and he was clearly f***cking up: assigning tasks to people and setting due dates without discussing dependencies, work flow, or how long the tasks would take. His people didn't really seem to be buying in to his plan.
AND THAT is bad enough, but there's even more: later in the week he sends us a bunch of dates we're now supposed to meet, that we never heard of before. As in "prior to February 1, we will need XYZ done by mid-November in order to provide ... yada yada yada". We don't know where he got his required dates from, and he never communicated those needs to us IN THE MEETINGS HE SPECIFICALLY SET UP to discuss such things!
I know that this kind of thing happens sometimes, but we are supposed to be more careful with peoples' time than this. I was livid, but got talked down by the lady who is managing the relationship between the groups. So, instead of making a stink, we got them to publish that the dates they are promising for THEIR items are tentative. And also - my group won't be promising anything those dates. Basically he has promised something that he can't deliver in any way but covering his ass by writing the word 'tentative' on the promise. Just ridiculous.
My relationship manager lady will be escalating this to people on our side, telling our VP what they're doing and stating that their approach is just dumb. They're promising things to their people that are dependent on dates from us - dates that we aren't promising.
All of this noise caused an extra 2 hours of meetings on my back this week beyond the 1.5.
As I told my relationship manager lady, I can do 60 one-minute tasks in an hour, such as updating a task board with important details, or sending one of the dozens of emails I send to Microsoft or other vendors daily to get them to escalate something they're dragging on. 3.5 hours wasted in a week of 37.5 hours is not ok.
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Don't know if this is of interest, but I put some effort into it anyway, in case anybody is interested.
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