Careerchat

[Iskaral Pust]

Congrats, Ix, it sounds like a great outcome.

A recruiter once (with a big dose of self-interest) told me you should seek new opportunities that almost make you vomit with anxiety or else you aren't pushing yourself hard enough. While I disagree, I do think we should weigh pros and cons and ignore the urge to vomit if our head knows this is the right decision.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

Congrats!  Sounds like a great position.

[Inigima]

Congrats Ix!

[Inigima]

Congrats Ix!

[Ixodes]

Thanks everyone!  Being honest, the pushing of my comfort envelope is exciting (with nervewracking mixed in).  I've been complacent and that hasn't been good for me mentally.  The travel is going to be biggest stress but I think I'll handle it well.  Especially if I get the chance to visit with some great boarders as a fringe benefit.

I thought it was going to be a big issue with Mrs Ix (she's going to get hammered at work until we hire my replacement) but it really wasn't.  After going over everything with her, she told me I absolutely have to go for it.  She was getting sick of me not content at work and if I turned the offer down she said I would be an absolute bastard to work with.  I couldn't ask for a better friend.

[MercenaryChef]

ix, that is fantastic!!! awesome news, dude. come on down to dc on business or pleasure anytime at all.

 

 

in my own career bit...

some months ago our hotel (and my restaurant) took on new shiny corporate overlords. i interviewed for the job that i already had and was doing rather well. obviously i got said job again. again as before i was not offered a chance to negotiate my salary. of the managers in the hotel only a few were not kept on. 

the transition was kind of rough really. on my side of operations it was simply business as usual. but payroll, taxes and finances were a beast. we are still working with that a bit. the new shiny leaders told us of our bright future in their culture of promises. i went to a pretty cool summit with all the chefs in the company in november. i was feeling pretty ok about things. i was even being tapped to be a task force member on two openings in nyc.

and boom!

the new shiny company has joined forces with another shiny company and becoming super mega shiny hospitality supreme robot company! yay! yay? huh? 

it is a massive merger. it will mean there will be some 100 hotels and resorts in this new uber company's portfolio.  that is kind of significant. 

i get that this is the corporate world. these things happen. but, the restructuring on the corporate level is only complicating trying to settle in on an operations level. we barely knew our masters before and now they are possibly being replaced. 

when the first new company came in my bonus was voided as it was based on the contract with the former management company. now i imagine i will have a similar thing happen with the new masters. god damn it.

[Iskaral Pust]

Sorry MC. M&A is always a huge headache. If your bargaining position is strong enough, you could ask for a retention bonus to stick around and deal with the new round of headaches.

[MercenaryChef]

6 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Sorry MC. M&A is always a huge headache. If your bargaining position is strong enough, you could ask for a retention bonus to stick around and deal with the new round of headaches.

Not in my field. Truly unless you are an absolutely extraordinary talent and or personality there is always someone else who can come in and do your job. 

I meet our new hotel gm tomorrow. My numbers and quality speak to it being easy to retain my job but my salary is what it is. Our ownership company is very tight fisted with the payroll. 

[Angalin]

Congratulations, Ix!

MC, not sure what to say except hope the meeting goes as well as possible. 

I talked to my contact who was helpful. He is actually incredibly patient and put up with me asking him about how he uses commas in his writing style at the end. 

[Xray the Enforcer]

Serial comma or GTFO

[Angalin]

Quote

 

 

8 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

Serial comma or GTFO

He actually doesn't use many commas at all, which is how it started. (You would have felt for him: it was a bit of an interrogation, right down to having a blinding beam of sunlight in his eye.)

[Iskaral Pust]

Someone on my team, who joined us only 2.5 months ago, just told me today he is resigning to rejoin a former employer who is a direct competitor of ours.  I had to take his laptop and walk him out of the building.  Very weird situation.  And another guy just told me he is going to retire later this year.  And I already had four open positions that I am trying to fill.  I'm going to spend so much time on recruiting again this year.

My latest hire started last week and does seem to be settling in, at least.

[Xray the Enforcer]

How effin' frustrating. I mean, the retirement thing isn't something you can control. But someone hitting the eject button only a couple of months in...I'd be doing a bit of snooping to see what the actual cause of that was. Could be an internal issue/clash of personalities; could be corporate espionage; could be something else.

I'm in the supremely annoying position of various groups in my organization thinking they have/need a piece of me. Partly my own fault, as I was trying to be a good team player. But I didn't do a good job of protecting my own interests, and now I'm busy carrying other peoples' water instead of doing a job that has some strategic advantages. I've already spoken to my boss about this, and now we have the unenviable task of building a barricade around me, which is going to piss off a number of people. Eh, fuck it. If I don't get some space to do the job I actually want to do (and the one I know has more strategic value to the organization as a whole), then I'm gonna to take my ample talents somewhere else. I'm giving this until the end of 2016 (that would be six months into the next fiscal year). It was a lesson I needed to learn, but gods my job is intolerable right now.

[Iskaral Pust]

Sorry X-Ray. I would suggest you have someone senior announce your role on the project you actually want, with just a little fanfare to establish as a priority. Then go back to the other groups and tell them you now only have X% capacity available for them all combined and they need to agree between them how they would like to allocate. It's a tragedy of the commons, but it should be their tragedy rather than yours.

Regarding my quick turnover guy, I'm meeting him for a beer tomorrow evening to watch some basketball and find out more about his motivation now that he doesn't need to blow smoke. Corporate espionage, probably more opportunistic than premeditated, is a very real risk here. IT will do a forensics check on his laptop to see if he copied or printed a lot of material. But that stuff can be hard to detect and even harder to litigate.

[Xray the Enforcer]

That's solid advice, and I'll suggest it to my boss (who is a VP in the org). Thank you! Part of the problem is that we've gone through a series of re-orgs, and I've got a bunch of legacy work that is now taking up 90 percent of my time, when it should be 2 percent. But we just announced a new "Chief" in the area where I should be working, and it's a major part of our strategic plan, so there's very real imperative and argument to completely realign my job with where I want to go. I'm just mad at myself for not throwing elbows sooner. 

[HairBearHero]

Wise folks of the board, I find myself at something of a loss.

I am 25, and have had one job since graduating. Last year I left that job to go travelling as I was fed up of the job, my home patch and life in general. This was an excellent decision, but has left me certain that I don't want to continue working in offshore finance and so I'm moving to mainland UK later this year. 

The downside of this is that I have a fairly specialised skillset (I worked for a business intelligence consultancy that tended to act in a weird hybrid IT/Finance capacity) and no desire to continue in the industry where it'd be most applicable. I've also got no answer to the other half of the question - what do I actually want to do?

I realise that this is all a bit vague and not terribly helpful, but I'm basically stumped. I'm not a particularly work-driven person (I stayed at the previous job for 3 years largely because I liked the people, the work was reasonably interesting and the workload wasn't very demanding) and I've only ever jobhunted once. I have absolutely no idea what I want to do or how to go about figuring out what career might interest me. Any advice appreciated.

[Starkess]

Hm, no advice, sorry, but if you figure it out I'd love to know myself...

[Inigima]

We can't tell you what you want to do. If you liked the basic kind of work you were doing, you can try to look at what parts interested you most and look for jobs that take you in that direction. There's a pretty big need for IT people who understand the business side of things too.

Wait, no. You should be a rum smuggler.

[zelticgar]

1 hour ago, Inigima said:

We can't tell you what you want to do. If you liked the basic kind of work you were doing, you can try to look at what parts interested you most and look for jobs that take you in that direction. There's a pretty big need for IT people who understand the business side of things too.

Wait, no. You should be a rum smuggler.

Yes, tough to know what to advise without some sense of what you like. If you want to use some of your BI and Finance skills but targeting a different industry you could try going to some technology specific Meet-Up groups.

I head up engineering and university recruiting for a pretty large internet company and I've been working with various department leads to build out recruiting strategies targeting meet up groups. We have been doing it over the last couple of years and we have found some success using this as a channel for hiring. We are finding there are a bunch of people going to these groups as a way to network and learn about new technology. Many of them have non traditional backgrounds or work in industries we would never have though to target through traditional recruiting methods. You never know, you might land something in an industry or company that you never considered.

[Iskaral Pust]

HBH - as others have said, it's impossible to tell you what you should do.  

But this really should not be all that hard for you to work out.  It's not a question of deep soul-searching and finding yourself but of putting yourself in the right environment. You have to ask what do you like and what are you good at?  You could find a match for those in many different industries by choosing the right role.  The specific role and environment are more important than the specific industry.

I like intellectual stimulation & complexity, lots of variety, and I am stimulated by working with other people (I'm very extroverted and hate working in isolation for long periods).  I'm very good at math and abstract concepts/models and I'm unusually good at communicating for someone with my technical ability.  I work in finance & investments, but I found a specific type of role that suits me.  People with very different personalities and skills have found other roles in finance.  I could have found roles in software development, business management, engineering, or other fields that would also suit me.  But once you get beyind some level of industry-specific knowledge you are less likely to switch industry completely. 

So start with some self-awareness and then do a little research and networking to find out what roles might exist that would fit.  Try talking to people with similar wants and skills (not necessarily the same knowledge or background).  

Best of luck