BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
Notice I said they were in another country, so FMLA, and Hippa don't apply, but their country likely had some equivalent and likely more comprehensive set of laws.
This is part of a larger story but I'm trying to figure out what details need to be kept in or left out, or what the statute of limitations are. So I was working at a place and things went sour. My boss changed several times, restructuring, and other issues. The person who eventually became my boss had never been a boss before, and didn't understand our department or what we did. He never assigned me work, or kept tabs on me, he never knew what I was working on, or what I had accomplished, yet he did my performance reviews and controlled my bonuses and raise. In the first performance review he called me "unapproachable", the next year he called me "abrasive" and told other coworkers to "stop their bitching" when they complained about the department. He didn't like me, and didn't want to interact with me.
So after this I decided to have a little game to see how long he would go between talking to me. I told a few coworkers about this game and was curious how far out of his way he would go to not interact with me. He sat a couple aisles over from me, but it had been over two months of not seeing him, or even receiving an email. I was working with someone in the build area working on a project. My boss came in and started asking about the progress of what we were doing. After he left the coworker said "Well I guess two months is the limit", and I said "No it is still going, did you notice he never once looked at me, or addressed me." The three of us were in a circle a few feet from each other but he did all he could to avoid me. I don't remember how far it went, but I do know I put in my two weeks and never heard from him in those two weeks. There was no knowledge transfer before I left, no one knew what the SCC was, let alone where it was, or how the source for any project worked. I mostly worked alone and no one was interviewed to replace me before I left.
There's a lot more to this story involving my good bye email, some Yes Men, and restructuring, but I think those will have to wait a little longer...
Honestly I have to keep it going so that I don't forget all my stories. Enough time needs to pass that those involved are less likely to be identified, but not so much time passing that I forget them. I have a Google doc now with a draft of a few of them. What is LabVIEW's equivalent of the midichlorian?
Failure to communicate
I was a young engineer working at my first real job. I was still in college, and would work for 3 months, then go to classes for 3 months back and forth. At this company we made a custom test system for a customer. The customer was so happy that they ordered several more after the first systems were deployed, and several more the following year. I came in after a semester at school and found that the customer had asked for a few more test systems to be made. Being a young intern I never really interacted with the customer much, and the fact that I would be unreachable for 3 months at a time meant my work generally was given to me by a more senior engineer. I also wasn't involved in any program management meetings, or meetings about the project at all. In these early days I was a minion who was given work to do, and I did it. So as a young minion and being familiar with this tester design I was given the task to build up a new duplicate tester. The hardware guys built it up, I loaded the software, and started troubleshooting any issues. The types of issues I'd find were usually incorrect wiring, or wiring that crimped the shield so connections weren't made, and a few other minor things. To troubleshoot this it usually meant checking wiring with a meter, and a oscilloscope and usually involved a power supply to power up some part of the stand manually to check things out.
I was working through the integration of this tester, fixing issues getting this tester working. When I was working on the stand I would clean up a bit at the end of the day, but leave most of the equipment in the tester like a scope and power supply because I knew the next day I would be working on it. So one day I left to go home, and the next I came in to work on the tester and it was gone. Odd I thought, wonder why they moved it. So I asked one of the hardware guys where my tester was and he said "Oh they shipped that out this morning."...my heart sank. Uhh...okay thanks. My work wasn't done, it didn't work, and it was in a state of integration. I then realized that no meeting, no emails, and no updates were asked, or given to the senior engineers on the project. They just gave me a task, gave no due date, and assumed it was done so they shipped it out. A few days later the customer calls up very upset. They complained about wires pulled out of the terminals, and hardware like power supplies just sitting in the tester not hooked up. After a few conversations I came to think that everyone had forgotten I was even given the task. No one was pointing fingers but eventually the senior engineer on the project flew out to the customers site and fixed all their issues.
