Jump to content

Careerchat IV


Stannis Eats No Peaches

Recommended Posts

@A True Kaniggit more context is needed before you go asking for a raise.  Is this a big employer with a fixed annual cycle for pay reviews?  Did they always expect you to take on this additional work once you got up to speed?  Either of those would say don’t ask for a raise yet.  But at a minimum you should have a conversation about what are the expectations for your current role and current pay, and then naturally push for when and why your pay level should advance.  Everyone should have solid mutual expectations with their boss.

@kairparavel take the coaching when it’s offered like that.  Unless someone is being really skeevy and suggests they do it over dinner, then take them up on the offer.  They only offered because they think you’re lacking it and that you’re worth investing their time to do it.  It’s not cheating to receive advice or coaching to help you develop.  Would you not try to coach people who you were managing?

It’s great that you’re doing so well in your new job, especially one you started during COVID.  Not an easy time to find your feet in a new organization.  But if you want to  advance into more senior roles, you need to be able to articulate your perception, thought process and judgment of possible situations.  Don’t think about it as self-promotion, think about it as assessing what is needed in a situation, what are the viable options to deliver that, and what is your preferred route and why.  That is your leadership style.  Step outside of yourself as you look at the situation (even a hypothetical one). Operating at a more senior level is usually about greater and greater abstraction: instead of doing something you think about how others should do it, then you think about why they should do it, and then you move on to what anyone should be doing in the first place.  Most management speak is about conveying those abstractions to others who hold a similar picture.

Best of luck. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

@A True Kaniggit more context is needed before you go asking for a raise.  Is this a big employer with a fixed annual cycle for pay reviews?  Did they always expect you to take on this additional work once you got up to speed?  Either of those would say don’t ask for a raise yet.  But at a minimum you should have a conversation about what are the expectations for your current role and current pay, and then naturally push for when and why your pay level should advance.  Everyone should have solid mutual expectations with their boss.

Negative. After talking with coworkers who have been here years longer, I learned there is no annual raise, or even a discussion of such. The company is content with letting people work at their current wage unless the employee brings it up. 
 

 no, the current extra work is due to Covid removing employees. And the fact I get bored. 
 

Edit: suppose I shouldn’t use the word “solely” if there are two reasons. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Negative. After talking with coworkers who have been here years longer, I learned there is no annual raise, or even a discussion of such. The company is content with letting people work at their current wage unless the employee brings it up. 
 

 no, the current extra work is due solely to Covid removing employees. And the fact I get bored. 

Go for it.  Good luck

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So many of you know I've been struggling for oh my entire life to figure out what I want to do. I've toyed with the idea of science writing and science communication, but I've gotten a lot more serious about it lately and I am tentatively feeling optimistic that I'm at least headed in the right direction. I'm doing an internship this quarter with the communication office for my division at the university, and getting to develop articles for publication and learn this process better has been really fun so far. I've also had a mild amount of success doing space/astronomy outreach on TikTok, of all places. I've got about 6k followers now across platforms! That's small in the big scheme of things, but it's a lot to me and I am enjoying the interactions and sharing my love of this field.

Now to see if I can somehow actually make money off this...

I've got 1.5 years to go before I graduate, so plenty of time, but it's a daunting task. Freelancing? Aiming for a staff writing gig? Where am I even going to be living?! What is the world going to look like then?!?!

Okay existential crises aside, it's good-ish news.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/5/2021 at 6:24 PM, Starkess said:

So many of you know I've been struggling for oh my entire life to figure out what I want to do. I've toyed with the idea of science writing and science communication, but I've gotten a lot more serious about it lately and I am tentatively feeling optimistic that I'm at least headed in the right direction. I'm doing an internship this quarter with the communication office for my division at the university, and getting to develop articles for publication and learn this process better has been really fun so far. I've also had a mild amount of success doing space/astronomy outreach on TikTok, of all places. I've got about 6k followers now across platforms! That's small in the big scheme of things, but it's a lot to me and I am enjoying the interactions and sharing my love of this field.

Now to see if I can somehow actually make money off this...

I've got 1.5 years to go before I graduate, so plenty of time, but it's a daunting task. Freelancing? Aiming for a staff writing gig? Where am I even going to be living?! What is the world going to look like then?!?!

Okay existential crises aside, it's good-ish news.

Hope it works out! I think that’s really cool and also fulfills an important need, making science more accessible to the general public. I am sure that if you keep at it you will land somewhere interesting, even if the where is a place of your own making.

It’s a bummer that the TLC, Discovery, History, NatGeo, etc cable channels are now half shows about the morbidly obese and the other half about hillbillies looking for Sasquatch. Even just a little bit of dedication to actual science you’d think would open up opportunities to work on educational TV shows as a staff writer. I guess PBS NOVA and the BBC still have some legit programming but they sit on a pretty lonely perch. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

How much have resume templets changed in the last few years? I need to update mine because I'm not wasting another single day at my job. Have not been in in two weeks do to some family stuff which has made me depressed, yet frankly nothing depresses me more than my job. It's not bad in the sense I make $50k plus great benefits to do next to nothing, but the office environment is awful, my coworkers mostly suck and the job is completely dead end now that there's no way I'll be able to transfer to the psychology department. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/5/2021 at 5:24 PM, Starkess said:

I've got 1.5 years to go before I graduate, so plenty of time, but it's a daunting task. Freelancing? Aiming for a staff writing gig? Where am I even going to be living?! What is the world going to look like then?!?

I thought the goal of every 6'4 ex-military scientist pursuing a PhD was always to take over the world at some point. Did I get that one wrong?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/28/2021 at 12:00 AM, kairparavel said:

 

Anyways, any suggestions for future interview prep? If this doesn't work out now I'll certainly have other opportunities in the future.

I do a lot of work with my staff preparing them for interviews. The best and only way is to do mock ones on my experience. I have a bank of questions and I sit them down and we go through the whole interview process as it If it was real for weeks in advance. I give feedback and over the weeks we work to hone their evidence. The only way to prepare for the weird feeling in interviews is to make it feel not weird by repetition. 

I do this as it was done for me. One year I went for promotion and despite having excellent evidence I scored as low as it's possible to score. The next year 2 of my senior leaders drilled me for weeks and with the same evidence I absolutely nailed it. 

Edit, just saw in subsequent post you got it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I thought the goal of every 6'4 ex-military scientist pursuing a PhD was always to take over the world at some point. Did I get that one wrong?

I RegrEt that Some thIngS you can't jusT go saying on public message boards...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

In the accounting and finance world, resume templates have not changed significantly.

Not sure about what field you are in. Take a look at some resumes that have been submitted to your department, if you can. 

Avoid: the “objective” field that was trendy in the 90s and early 2000s, and definitely avoid the “hobbies and activities” field that many millennials and Gen-z’s are using. I look at those and am like “I do not give a f—- what your hobbies are.”

Humblebrag on your charity work instead.

Put a succinct summary at the top of your three strongest capabilities.  Don’t assume those will be accurately inferred from listing all of your past job titles, where importance-inflation has devalued all meaning. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I’ve got a LinkedIn question that y’all might be able to help me with -

Does anyone else have the problem of recruiters contacting you for roles that are way too junior? Is it something in my profile that is causing this, or is this because recruiters are just trying to cast a wide net?

This. 

When I worked in semiconductor manufacturing recruiters would constantly reach out to me about equipment engineering jobs though my profile contained zero mention of or experience. It was the word technician (process engineering) that always landed me in their searches. And it was always a 'if you are interested or know someone who might be' as a way to farm out their job.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agreed with @kairparavel, they use inclusive search terms to get as many eyeballs as possible.  
I have a stint as a Chief Investment Officer on my Linked-In, and somewhere in the text it’s abbreviated as CIO.  And I routinely get job offers and sales pitches to a Chief Information Officer instead.  And sometimes I still get offers for run-of-the-mill actuarial jobs.

I’m sure your profile is fine for anyone who should be able to recognize what it represents.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 3/11/2021 at 6:59 PM, Chataya de Fleury said:

I’ve got a LinkedIn question that y’all might be able to help me with -

Does anyone else have the problem of recruiters contacting you for roles that are way too junior? Is it something in my profile that is causing this, or is this because recruiters are just trying to cast a wide net?

Bit late but anyway... I think they just get triggered by the key words in the resume. I get a lot of offers for roles that I did decades ago which doesn't reflect at all what I'm doing now. Should try and put my elementary school experience in and see what I get from that.

But one question about recruiter etiquette. I get a flood of good job openings right now and while I have no intention of changing jobs (or rather not allowed to), I sometimes bite but ask for a very high enumeration. Nothing unreasonable but this usually stops the process. I do that to keep my interview skills honed and because everything is done remote these days, it doesn't waste too much time.  But I wonder if that is not burning bridges for later when I might need to move on after all. Seems not to be a problem with, for example, AWS. They keep contacting me for different roles. But their pay is lousy anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i am suffering from burnout at my current gig. i feel bad for it. with this whole pandemic thing and everything that has happened i should just be happy to be employed, but i am not.

while i have learned some interesting techniques and get to work with some stellar products the food often just comes across as too salty and too rich in an attempt to be luxurious. dishes are conceived for appearance and other factors take a backseat. some items take longer to put on the plate than they do to cook. overall i find the food soulless. i have little influence on the menu at all.

but, boy do i get to work! 12 and 14 hour days are the norm again. i do all the butchery, do all organizing,  ordering and other tasks to keep the place running. during service i work a station. my output to return is not good right now.

the owner is a talented chef, but has other projects and cannot focus his attention on this restaurant so he and i discussed him hiring a true chef du cuisine to push the food forward.

rather than actually search out someone he hired a former sous chef who is spoken of as a joke by other staff. for me that's a regressive move. 

the exec sous i have spoken of in other posts is a non-issue at this point. i work around him and he will take direction from me which is helpful. but he is still ultimately clueless and will come in see me neck deep in prep with a list on the wall and think the best use of his time is to r&d a new dish. 

in addition the place suffers from some culture issues that i cannot possibly fix as they start at the top. 

overall i am getting no satisfaction from my time each day. a craft that i love so much is rendered to just be work. and it is work that doesn't pay quite what it used to. owners and operators have used the pandemic and their lowered revenues to lower pay for staff. as revenues return to pre-pandemic levels wages will not. capitalism is pretty neat.

yeah, so that's that. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sorry @MercenaryChef, I didn’t realize that you were so dissatisfied.  I thought you would be still in the honeymoon phase after taking on this new position.  Was that only ~18 months ago?  Time passes strangely during COVID.

If I can paraphrase: you sound like an over-worked COO who’s feeling disconnected from the product, with an absent and distracted CEO who needs to install a head of content (CIO in my world, CTO in tech), but he’s made an underwhelming, underpowered selection for the role.

And working long hours for reduced pay will leave anyone burned out.  Just my opinion, but I don’t think 60+ hours a week is sustainable in the long term in any job that demands creativity and good judgment, not unless that includes a lot of downtime within. You might be able to grind away at repetitive tasks for those long hours, but otherwise we’re kidding ourselves about whether we’re really bringing our best or going through the motions.

So what’s your path forward?  Confront the owner/CEO?  If you’ve absorbed a cut in pay to help keep him solvent, then he owes it to you to help with the non-financial problems like culture and having the right people in the right roles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...