About temp jobs: beware of your IT knowledge

[Element Alpha]

I need a small rant. Sorry.

I went to France last year and got back in february. When I got back, I found a job pretty quickly, but it turned out I didn't like their way of doing business: they simply told lies to their customers and let me and my coworkers do the clean-up.

I started playing with the idea of creating my own company, and am well on my way to have my own business. But in the meantime, I looked for another job, a part-time job, that would allow me to make my preparations to start my company. This was in june.

I found a job as an administrative employee: sorting files, classifying them, lots of word and excel documents, typical administrative tasks. I was supposed to be empoyed until the end of september, which was very convenient because I plan to start my own business right at the end of september.

Anyway, I used my supreme knowledge of IT to write macro's in excel. They gave me a huge pile of files, filled with names of all the empoyee's of the company, and I was supposed to type them all out, about 4 pages for each employee. That would have been around 5000 pages easily. I simply wrote a macro in excel and sucked the employee names right out of their files, into automaticaly generated template documunts and set it up so that I just had to press one button. Setting up the macro took me about 3 hours. Printing all the documents (the printer printed non-stop) took about 1 entire day.

Turns out that's all I was supposed to do until september, so now I'm out of a job. I just found out about this an hour ago.

This is so silly I can't believe it.

Anyway, I suppose someone will read this story and remember it in similar circumstances. Don't over-do it when your only a temporary empoyee.

Greets all (and f.ck f.ck f.ck) :flame: :flame: :flame:

 

[Varg|Hund]

That sucks man : /

you should contact your Union, and see what they've got to say about this.

 

[$kelet0r]

EFFICIENCY FTW
good luck with your own project dude

 

[Element Alpha]

That sucks man : /

you should contact your Union, and see what they've got to say about this.

I got this temp job through an interim office. They use weekly contracts.

I can't do nothing about it. I already have an appointment for another job monday, so maybe it'll work out fine. I got all my savings stuck in my project and really need a small job to pay the usual bills right now.

Isn't it strange that when an empoyee tells his boss he's leaving on such a short notice it's so 'not done', while a company can lay off their employee's just like that. I'm pretty proud to be someone people can count on. But that only makes me more disapointed when I can't count on other people (like an employer who was supposed to give me work until september).

I'll survive. No worries. I only wrote this to vent and maybe to raise awareness among the fine folks on this forum.

 

[Varg|Hund]

Isn't it strange that when an empoyee tells his boss he's leaving on such a short notice it's so 'not done', while a company can lay off their employee's just like that.

Which is why one should beware of right-wing politics, and always vote left..
Employees > the company. At least, that's how it should be.

 

[Cube]

Yea, I'm taking it slowly with my temp job, which is adding products to an online software shop. And at the same time, increasing the amount of stuff I can do (and the amount of time I'm working there). For example, I suggested about a forum and some website updates, and just said that it shouldn't be too difficult for me to do.

So, he told me to do them after the products are added.

 

[Element Alpha]

Small update:

I've just talked to the manager again (I'm still there for two more hours today).

He said he'll find me some stuff to do for next week, but after that I'm on my own. At least it's something.

I think a lot of young folks may be confronted with this type of situations in the coming years. Old managers who know nothing about 'computers' recruiting people that go beyond the archaic work methods.

This guy is the administrative manager for crying out loud. He should be busy improving his service and know about these type of things, or at least he should try to find out. But instead he's too busy being old and outdated.

 

[Cube]

Small update:

I've just talked to the manager again (I'm still there for two more hours today).

He said he'll find me some stuff to do for next week, but after that I'm on my own. At least it's something.

I think a lot of young folks may be confronted with this type of situations in the coming years. Old managers who know nothing about 'computers' recruiting people that go beyond the archaic work methods.

This guy is the administrative manager for crying out loud. He should be busy improving his service and know about these type of things, or at least he should try to find out. But instead he's too busy being old and outdated.

You should "sell" the macro code, with instructions on using it, to the manager. It would save him a lot of money, too.

 

[Uriel]

Damn French.

 

[Raxxman]

essentially for a job like this you shouldn't be working on a timed contract. You should arrange a quote and end product contract.

If you are, and you finish early, don't present work untill the end of the contract.

Essentially efficency is screwed over in timed contracts. The exact same is true of builders, you pay them for the work, not the time, then they need to haul ass.

See if next time you can get a contract like that. This is how all freelance ITing should be done

 

[Greatgat]

Well, it does suck, but one thing: At least it sounds like when you get your company started, you're going to be good at running it.

'WORK HARDER!' Your employees will fear you and your constantly ready whip.

 

[kruge]

You have my sympathy. I lost my job last month because of health reasons:

I've got a chronical disease that sometimes gets the better of me and really winds me down, making it hard to work concentrated for 8hours a day. Actually I got my boss to change my contract from 40h/week to 30/week *including* a nice raise, but the blokes at T-Mobile (where I worked as an external) didn't like that and cancelled my contract.

In their view I wasn't doing my work fast enough, leaving "too early" too often.

Now, actually this is kind of funny: My job was to optimize the #includes of 6GB sourcecode that had grown over the years (the software that practically runs everything for t-mobile). Over those years hundreds of programmers added more and more includes to the code and usually forgot to remove them if no longer needed, blowing up the compiling time *immensely*.

- my job was urgently needed to be done for years
- when I felt bad and left early THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY FOR ME
- the job wasn't bound to any final deadlines like allmost all the others in the whole project

And now, because I wasn't fast enough (not taking into concern the system downtime and stuff like that), noone's doing that job, again, and won't be doing it in the future as it seems, leaving loads of unoptimized code as it was for years and actually some that I blew up, doing a "quick and dirty" thing at one time when I thought that I'd come back to the sourcecode to clean it up in twoo weeks.

You gotta laugh at things like this...

 

[Puzzlemaker]

You should have given him a couple of papers a day, and spent your whole day lounging around.

I mean, really.

 

[AmishSlayer]

Something kind of like this is going on for me right now. I got an IT internship for the summer at a company. Well I found faster ways to do the work they gave me much like you did so they were shocked and surprised when I took a couple hours to do a few weeks worth of work (in their mind). They scrambled around looking for more work for me but eventually they ran out of work for me.

So here I am, finally my last day on the job before I go back up to school and for the past few weeks I've been sitting on my ass and watching TV shows on my Zen Vision.

Today is Rescue Me

Oh yea, and they asked me if I wanted to come back next summer.

 

[Fat Tony!]

Now you've learnt a useful technique though. Just create a macro to only do a days work, then you can sit back and relax. Use this site http://www.workfriendly.net/ and browse hl2.net all day or whatever and print it all off at the end of the day.

 

[Wesisapie]

I have a similar story.

I was in japan working at a small company that was basically computer sales, repair, databackup, network setup, callouts, things like this, the whole shebang. the company was owned by a 35 year old drug addict who happened to have really good sales skills. he got lots of business with his gift of the gab, but the problem was, he promised things that would end up filtering down to me (head technician). the problem was, he wasnt just expecting me to do this technician work, which would have been easy enough.
he was then expecting me to do all the customer relations for the foreign (ie. not japanese) customers, go to do on-site jobs, and everything we did in the company. this was fine, i was doing it all fine, no ****ups, all happy customers.
but then he starts saying im not selling enough new PCs, or getting rid of enough old stock. the main problem was the prices were extortionate, and the stuff he was trying to sell was garbage.
so because i wasnt selling much new stuff (however fixing multiple PCs and doing multiple data recoveries per day) he said i was losing the company money.

this would be fair enough if i was being paid kings wages, but for a head technician (or anybody for that matter), i was being paid a pittance (think around minimum wage). not to mention they charged through the ears for their services.

eventually i fixed the huge mountainload of computers that were piled up when i started working there, and there were hardly any new computers coming in.

eventually i quit over a pay dispute (which i got fixed in my favour after i left with standover tactics) but boy oh boy, id never work there again. they had a very high staff turnover rate...

this doesnt really relate so much to the main story, but i think the main point is this - don't do a great job, just do the status quo. business cant handle such a shakeup as that.

 

[Krynn72]

I too have a similar story. I was working at Aetna doing a temp job for 3 months. Basically all I had to do was take information that was on paper and put it into their computer system. When I first got there I was amazed at how inefficient their full time workers were. We had to put in the information into three different programs, and the people who did this sat there and manually typed in all the information 3 times for every bit of paper. They would open one program, type in all the information there for every page, close the program, open the other, and start over, and repeat again.

Im not tech savvy at all really, but all I did was have all 3 open at once, type something, copy/paste in the other two and be done with that page. Just by knowing copy/paste, and having 3 windows open (gasp), I tripled the output of what their best full time employee was doing. Of course, I never ran out of work (except for one day, so I sat around for the last 4 hours) but my boss loved me for it. And funnily enough, the people who got the information I was putting in got angry at me because now they couldnt f*ck around all day since I kept giving them more work.


Good times.