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oh look, it's Sunday again
Oct. 4th, 2009 09:00 pmAnd nearly another week gone by and I've barely written. I'm not doing very well with either writing for an audience or as a personal diary. With that in mind, let's try a recap of the week:
Yesterday was the annual "Apple Fest" carnival at the elementary school, and I took Dan and Elyssia. When I picked them up, Elyssia immediately started telling me about the cookies her friend Delaney made, which were oatmeal-chocolate chip. I wasn't sure why she was so enthusiastically sharing this with me, but all was made plain once we got to the school and eventually made our way to the cafeteria. They had a bake sale going for which parents and teachers had made various cookies, brownies, cakes and pies. Luckily, we found Delaney's cookies and I bought two for Elyssia. The rest of the day could have been a complete bust (it wasn't at all), and it wouldn't have mattered, cause she got to have some of her friend's cookies.
After I took the kids home (and their mom to the grocery store), Sam came back here with me. She'd been asking for awhile to come over and watch Mirrormask, so we did that. I also got us KFC, cause Sam is on a KFC-kick anr requested that for dinner. It was good, but I have to stop spending money on a whim like that when I don't have to. I have expenses coming up (trip to Ohio, new tires for the van, and Christmas) that I need to save more than my usual bi-monthly allotment to my savings account. I'm all to good at nickel-and-diming my extra money away, especially at ten bucks a whack.
Friday was an interesting day at work. The company delayed salary increases this year. They gave some official reason about being conservative in the current economy, and cited a $10 million one-time adjustment they had to take in the 2nd quarter for an accounting discrepancy (for which both the CFO and the head of finance over in the U.K. were shown the door). Part of the reason is also the undercurrent of consumer-anger directed at the financial industry as a whole over the government bailout, executive pay, and general dissatisfaction with the economy. So, all that translated into no increases this year and no bonus. For the first time in over 20 years, the company isn't paying a bonus--to anyone, including all of the executives. To make-up for that, they are going to do salary performance increases in January instead of in April.
Toward that end, my manager had everyone in the group fill-out a self-evaluation. There were the usual questions about accomplishments and goals, but there were also questions asking for feedback and a chance to make a requests for things like training or a chance to do a certain type of work (like storage system admin work, or db stuff).
In doing all of that, I think I finally figured out why I still don't feel like I've integrated myself into the group: we aren't a group, we're a collection of individual contributors. Everyone in the group has projects assigned to them, and it seems that only very seldom is it more than one admin per project. And while there are a few people who will often help out the person who is on-call with the daily maintenance requests, as that responsibility is rotated along with the after-hours on-call duty, mostly there's no group effort to speak of. My manager deals with us as individuals, for the most part. On one hand, she establishes a closer rapport that allows her to build trust and delegate responsibility without turning into a micro-manager. But, on the other hand, she fails to leverage that unique human quality where the whole can be greater than the sum of it's part, because there's no real "whole" to speak of when it comes to measuring productivity. There have been a couple of occasions, most notably the disaster recovery test, where we have functioned as a group. But not many. And not enough to forge an identity, I think.
I kept thinking that eventually it would make more sense, but in talking one-on-one with nearly everyone in the group now, it's apparent that there's really nothing else to figure out, as several people have confirmed my conclusion, in their own way. Now, my challenge is to determine if the downside of this is really all that bad, or just something very different than I've experienced before.
Yesterday was the annual "Apple Fest" carnival at the elementary school, and I took Dan and Elyssia. When I picked them up, Elyssia immediately started telling me about the cookies her friend Delaney made, which were oatmeal-chocolate chip. I wasn't sure why she was so enthusiastically sharing this with me, but all was made plain once we got to the school and eventually made our way to the cafeteria. They had a bake sale going for which parents and teachers had made various cookies, brownies, cakes and pies. Luckily, we found Delaney's cookies and I bought two for Elyssia. The rest of the day could have been a complete bust (it wasn't at all), and it wouldn't have mattered, cause she got to have some of her friend's cookies.
After I took the kids home (and their mom to the grocery store), Sam came back here with me. She'd been asking for awhile to come over and watch Mirrormask, so we did that. I also got us KFC, cause Sam is on a KFC-kick anr requested that for dinner. It was good, but I have to stop spending money on a whim like that when I don't have to. I have expenses coming up (trip to Ohio, new tires for the van, and Christmas) that I need to save more than my usual bi-monthly allotment to my savings account. I'm all to good at nickel-and-diming my extra money away, especially at ten bucks a whack.
Friday was an interesting day at work. The company delayed salary increases this year. They gave some official reason about being conservative in the current economy, and cited a $10 million one-time adjustment they had to take in the 2nd quarter for an accounting discrepancy (for which both the CFO and the head of finance over in the U.K. were shown the door). Part of the reason is also the undercurrent of consumer-anger directed at the financial industry as a whole over the government bailout, executive pay, and general dissatisfaction with the economy. So, all that translated into no increases this year and no bonus. For the first time in over 20 years, the company isn't paying a bonus--to anyone, including all of the executives. To make-up for that, they are going to do salary performance increases in January instead of in April.
Toward that end, my manager had everyone in the group fill-out a self-evaluation. There were the usual questions about accomplishments and goals, but there were also questions asking for feedback and a chance to make a requests for things like training or a chance to do a certain type of work (like storage system admin work, or db stuff).
In doing all of that, I think I finally figured out why I still don't feel like I've integrated myself into the group: we aren't a group, we're a collection of individual contributors. Everyone in the group has projects assigned to them, and it seems that only very seldom is it more than one admin per project. And while there are a few people who will often help out the person who is on-call with the daily maintenance requests, as that responsibility is rotated along with the after-hours on-call duty, mostly there's no group effort to speak of. My manager deals with us as individuals, for the most part. On one hand, she establishes a closer rapport that allows her to build trust and delegate responsibility without turning into a micro-manager. But, on the other hand, she fails to leverage that unique human quality where the whole can be greater than the sum of it's part, because there's no real "whole" to speak of when it comes to measuring productivity. There have been a couple of occasions, most notably the disaster recovery test, where we have functioned as a group. But not many. And not enough to forge an identity, I think.
I kept thinking that eventually it would make more sense, but in talking one-on-one with nearly everyone in the group now, it's apparent that there's really nothing else to figure out, as several people have confirmed my conclusion, in their own way. Now, my challenge is to determine if the downside of this is really all that bad, or just something very different than I've experienced before.
