this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Ah I have the attitude of “you’re free to pay me engineer money to do this, but I’m leaving at 4 whether I was productive or doing weird bullshit you decided on.“
Sure, if there's a business need for cleaning the office toilets I'll stop coding and do it for a day.
In this case it's "everyone needs to spend a few weeks getting points in the training portal, we don't care what you do in there as long as you get points". This clearly doesn't fulfill any business need, people just do whatever BS is the least effort per point. And as you might expect from an internal training portal, spending 20 minutes in that thing makes me want to stab myself.
Again, if there's a business need for it that's a different story, but useless mandates just to jerk people around are a deal breaker.
Ok that’s fair. I’m an engineer and I’ve told my line workers consistently that I’ll never ask them to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do, and at times I do have to help out because shit happens when you’ve got a skeleton crew. Hell I spend some days fabricating my designs.
And yeah I’d love good training. Teaching me actionable skills. Or just send me to grad school or give me a subscription to my professional organization and let me read their magazine on the job. Hell, throw IEEE in there, they’ve always got something to say. But no I’ve spent days doing the training portal bullshit on everything from “here’s how to deal with the fact that technically you’re an arms trafficker, don’t do treason and don’t think about how you’re a legitimate military target” to “watch a too damn long video about workplace sexual harassment that was clearly not written by anyone who’s ever seen a factory floor” and it just made me want to bash my brain in.
See, those are needed for compliance/CYA. That has business value, so I can work with that. What I'm referring to here is just training on useless stuff for the sake of racking up points.