Strange Things at Work

[selenite0]

My project is launching an interesting initiative. Managers with work they don't have anyone to do right away can post the tasks on an internal bulletin board. Any employee can take a look at the list and volunteer to take one on. This is being pitched as "career-broadening" opportunities. Engineers can try out working in another area without having to make a big jump into the unknown. I figure I'll check it out, there might be some fun stuff to do.

I'm wondering what management's actual motive for this is. It's an open admission that resources are badly allocated if they think some people have the spare time to do stuff like that. Which they are, but I'm surprised they'd admit it. The bigger motive might be trying to fight turnover. If people can experiment like that it reduces boredom and the sense of being trapped, both motives to quit. There's also the overtime problem. Lots of people are working huge amounts of overtime for show, without actually having work to do because they're waiting on somebody else. The task-sharing project may be a way to get some value from that.

Comments

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

Dude, that sounds AWESOME! I can see having some real fun with random non-urgent projects from other people's managers :)

You work for N-G, right? I may be making a note to self to visit them in my job-hunt soonish, so I'm trying to keep track of which of my friends works where :)

[tmc4242.livejournal.com]

He works for N-G AT LM.

Avoid Avoid Avoid.

Trust me on that. I know of what I speak... ;-)

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

If I could afford to be picky, I would be, but I was a bad little finance student, and forgot to do proper savings for the unemployed time, so...

I have a much better chance of getting re-hired at my part-time job for LMIT in VA, though, so I hopefully won't have to do too much avoiding.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Don't make decisions on this initiative, it might not last more than a month. Not that NGC is a bad company, but it's pretty much the same as the other huge aerospace firms. And don't apply to Lockheed Fort Worth unless you're getting really hard up.

[noumignon.livejournal.com]

I think Google requires you to spend 20% of your time doing work off your main project. So it could be sincere. Watch out for people who say, "He has time to work on other projects. Must not be doing that much here." Should be great for networking and stimulating ideas.

I believe Enron had a model like this, only even more so. If you could collect a team of people to work on a project, you could do it, so it was very disorganized and there was a "star system" where everybody tried to get in with the projects and managers that were doing well and shun the bad ones.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea. Pity the government contract regs make it legally actionable as defrauding the gov't.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

What selenite said. There are major scandals (where "major" = Congressional investigation, lots of newspaper headlines, and then people at both worker-bee and management levels get fired and/or go to prison) every few years over things like that. Officially/theoretically, there *is* no slack time. As in, at *my* Evil Aerospace Megacorporation, engineers charge their time in six-minute increments using an accounting system sufficiently detailed that I would be guilty of a Federal felony if I were to (random example) use both the "Shuttle booster separation" simulation tool and the "Shuttle launch tower clearance" tool without explicitly billing the time to two separate accounting charge numbers. MUCH badness would result if I were to screw up the accounting records while, say, spending a couple hours tweaking terminal guidance databases for an air-to-ground missile and an asteroid-rendezvous probe both on the same day.

The headlines on the aforementioned periodic major scandals don't make all this clear, though. They tend to look like "Evil Government Contractor Bills $2 Billion Air Force Bomb Program to NASA Research Budget".

The system as required by law actively punishes creative accounting.