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Saturday, August 25th, 2012 10:16 pm
sometimes, it's like this
Trufax: the day before a major deployment at work is stressful.
Trufax: yesterday me and my boss mused if we shouldn't be so hard on dev, being as a.) obviously they'd never seen a computer before and b.) probably lacked opposable thumbs.
Trufax: my very first supervisor in the agency is now supervisor of a different unit that is equivalent pay to ours and was poaching in my unit with my lead. I made my feelings on trying to lure away my lead clear. Because I do not say this lightly, our entire section will collapse and die forever if she does. He laughed at me. Goddamn him for being awesome.
It's tempting in a lot of ways to think about it. He is actually even better a manager than he thinks he is and that's actually saying something and the majority of his unit turnover is promotion, not lateral and even for that is pretty low because of the flexibility in work hours and work location. People can work from home from almost anywhere in the state. There are mandatory times you have to be in the office, but it doesn't have to be in Austin either.
Turnover is a really, really, really good indicator of a good manager in the agency. In general, it's not that there isn't ambition, but in the state, there's a lot people who do plan to stay with the state for the full twenty years, so unless you're miserable at your job, there's not a lot of rush when you're pretty okay with where you are when it's not directly related to the political parts. You need two things to move up, experience and nepotism, and staying in one place helps with both.
This can be hard to explain, the value of nepotism, because it has so many truly horrific connotations, and hey, I've benefited from it. The thing is, there is no one in the agency who doesn't or hasn't benefited from it, because that's the entire point when you move around, to find a job you like with a supervisor you can deal with and use that to move up. I was specifically instructed in this by one of my supervisors when I nervously told her years ago that I was going to an interview; that's what I was supposed to do.
All of my supervisors remember me fondly because one, I don't like being bad at what I do and everyone loves merit raises and I've made a virtue of my sheer impatience with boredom, and two, I throw origami at them when I want attention. This is actually known about me in some circles due to certain meetings where it was cranes from candy wrappers or falling asleep. Even my worst supervisor liked me like a lot, because when she was in the kind of mood where I could not possibly do anything right, if I heard her coming (you always did), I hid under my desk until she went away. Also, literal. I had a book and everything.
This is not a perfect system, but here are some reasons it's kind of necessary:
1.) the black hole effect of some units; you can't get out because your supervisor sucks so much that the unit gets a bad rep, and the supervisor themselves blocks transfers due to being dicks. These two things don't always go together, but you might be surprised to know there overlap is huge.
2.) some units also are by nature so limited in what they do that even being good at that still means your skillset is abysmal and hard to use out of it. In the state, there are built-in mechanisms for dealing with this, so it's more a matter of patience than actually being stuck there forever.
3.) doomed jobs--this is not common, but it has, does, and will happen and at any given time is happening to a department somewhere--where what you are given to do is over your head (and not by your fault; no one saw that dept would be given X to do and wtf) due to the legislature, politics, internal politics, or just pure bad luck. Especially with these, there are internal mechanisms that do deal with this--not like management isn't aware they are fucking you--but it really is a matter of being patient until the horror passes.
4.) random ass attrition - this is a conservative state, and social services are always first on the chopping block, which is hilarious in a black comedy way which I'll explain later. First line of defense is to basically kill all unfilled positions that exist--there are always a lot where someone left but hte position hasn't been filled for Reasons. Second is to remove existing jobs on a delay; ie, the jobs will be killed when the holder retires, which is actually effective, because most people will retire the minute they are able, take a year or two off, then come back. Third is to actively remove jobs in a delay of about year, wihch gives you plenty of time to go through the stages of grief and get another job.
5.) Rarely, but very consistently in some areas, a supervisor thinks you are too valuable to let go.
6.) Your supervisor/manager does not like you. This is almost never actually problem by itself, because it's really painfully obvious and the type who will do this tend to not do it to one person only in their entire lives, and everyone knows it's happening. In fact, it will be the equivalent of a billboard if they only do it to a single person for three years if you are in a major city, because if anyone is as terrible or whatever as this supervisor/manager says, then why on earth haven't they been fired. It's a problem when attached to one or five.
None of this is unique to the state, but it's not necessarily considered a drawback because a.) state employment can be generational so you've been raised to it and b.) I do not say this in a mean way but in a realistic way--if you work for the state for ten years, hate your job, and can't get out because you have no contacts anywhere else, then you have to be actively working never to meet anyone and actively hostile to those you do. My first two years, against my will, I was interacting one layer of bureaucracy away from the legislature and the office of internal investigations without even leaving my office.
(Note: That was because when my supervisor was in a bad mood I hid under my desk and only interacted with her when it was positive, true, so she thought I was wonderful--she'd never had an argument with me about anything ever! I was so positive and sympathetic!--and my punishment was to have three legislative aids with blackberries awkwardly try to interact with my clients while I interviewed them (me and my clients would kind of stare at each other in mutual embarrassment after each truly painful attempt, and at least a couple of my Spanish speaking ones lost their English entirely the second they walked into my office, which trust me, if I could have done the same thing, I would have. The OIG were slightly more canny about that, but when my clients realized they were there to make me nervous and didn't have any intention of trying to appear benevolently interested in the pain of the poor, they had a blast.)
I mean, there is a reason I've been a tester for a while now. I've applied for only one other type of position a few times, and even at my last interview I wasn't really feeling all that excited at the thought of leaving. Id' rather promote internally in my unit, to be honest.
There's also this: in terms of the level I'm at, I'm still kind of above natural paygrade and will be until I hit at least fifteen years tenure. In state employment, in my job, and for that matter the speed I went from caseworker to tester is not in any way unique, though it's somewhat unusual, I'm years away from being considered for some jobs. It does show; no matter how good I am at my job, there are a lot of people with more tenure and more experience that I can't compete with directly when they look at my resume. My mother didn't get to my level before her late forties and she had massive amounts of experience as well.
More importantly, and this I can't prove but I'm pretty sure is a consideration, is how fast I moved was merited, yes, but not necessarily for the right reasons to move up again anytime soon. A lot of why I interviewed well for tester was, well, fandom, not even going to lie--all my tech experience, understanding of programming, the fact I'd been doing program testing and documentation at my former job because the boredom principle had come into effect and my manager was tired of origami cranes on his desk so gave me something to do. But moving up is now complicated by that.
I was a good caseworker. I know this empirically; my stats, my evaluations, and my merit raises are all documented, so even during my worst days, I can look at my file and know I wasn't just good at it, I was probably the best in my unit and if Events hadn't occurred, I would have naturally moved up to supervisor and then up the regular caseworker hierarchy before getting where I am if I'd ever had a goal as tester. The thing is, I wasn't a caseworker long enough or ever a supervisor. Policy, state policy, is something that as a caseworker you learn down to your bones. By the end, I could--and still can--read an application and accurately tell someone whether they probably qualify for benefits with ninety degree accuracy.
My mother could ask them three questions and know with perfect accuracy.
It doesn't sound like a huge difference, but any caseworker after five years could do that. When I was a caseworker, my worker iv could interview someone while at the front desk and work the entire case in her head in less than ten minutes with their application and a piece of scratch paper if she had to. Any job I want now will be directly competing with people who could do that, and probably were supervisors as well. And for that matter, they know the people who are interviewing; they worked with them as caseworkers.
I don't have a problem with that. Testing is horrifically stressful and I hate some days like you would not believe, and every other build is a nightmare from which I sometimes think I will not awaken. But I love my job itself. I hate that the good is the enemy of the perfect is true, and that I cannot make myself accept that.
* My math says it costs the state more to do this than just leaving everything alone. Like with child protective services, they cut the budget and then there was a rash of inexplicable and really fucking public nursing home and adult and child abuse cases hitting all the papers. People blame the caseworkers, and they should in some of those cases, don't get me wrong here there was neglect of job duties, but what helps is when a workload allows workers to also sleep, and as a former food stamp/medicaid/tanf caseworker, if you were around when I was journaliing about this, sleep was one of the things that I wasn't getting a lot of, and my job at no time had a kid or elderly person's actual life hanging in the balance, just their medical care and ability to eat. After the abuse thing, the state recruited and bonused the fuck out of anyone who would apply and effectively had to spend a lot more than if they'd just left status quo. It cost them a lot with my agency when they treid to eliimiate three thousand jobs and then in horror realized a.) doing that would literally collapse the entire system and b.) before they realized that, everyone retired fast and got better jobs nad wouldn't come back to save their lives. Etnire offices were desperately made up of new hires and let me say, I'd stare at the stats in those offices with an expression not unlike that of a dog doing math; like, what the hell. Also, the state lost money to lawsuits and the feds for pulling that. Like, wow.)
The deployment was tonight, and they already scheduled people to come in tomorrow due to anticipating how badly this is probably going to go. By the grace of God I am not one of them this time.
Trufax: yesterday me and my boss mused if we shouldn't be so hard on dev, being as a.) obviously they'd never seen a computer before and b.) probably lacked opposable thumbs.
Trufax: my very first supervisor in the agency is now supervisor of a different unit that is equivalent pay to ours and was poaching in my unit with my lead. I made my feelings on trying to lure away my lead clear. Because I do not say this lightly, our entire section will collapse and die forever if she does. He laughed at me. Goddamn him for being awesome.
It's tempting in a lot of ways to think about it. He is actually even better a manager than he thinks he is and that's actually saying something and the majority of his unit turnover is promotion, not lateral and even for that is pretty low because of the flexibility in work hours and work location. People can work from home from almost anywhere in the state. There are mandatory times you have to be in the office, but it doesn't have to be in Austin either.
Turnover is a really, really, really good indicator of a good manager in the agency. In general, it's not that there isn't ambition, but in the state, there's a lot people who do plan to stay with the state for the full twenty years, so unless you're miserable at your job, there's not a lot of rush when you're pretty okay with where you are when it's not directly related to the political parts. You need two things to move up, experience and nepotism, and staying in one place helps with both.
This can be hard to explain, the value of nepotism, because it has so many truly horrific connotations, and hey, I've benefited from it. The thing is, there is no one in the agency who doesn't or hasn't benefited from it, because that's the entire point when you move around, to find a job you like with a supervisor you can deal with and use that to move up. I was specifically instructed in this by one of my supervisors when I nervously told her years ago that I was going to an interview; that's what I was supposed to do.
All of my supervisors remember me fondly because one, I don't like being bad at what I do and everyone loves merit raises and I've made a virtue of my sheer impatience with boredom, and two, I throw origami at them when I want attention. This is actually known about me in some circles due to certain meetings where it was cranes from candy wrappers or falling asleep. Even my worst supervisor liked me like a lot, because when she was in the kind of mood where I could not possibly do anything right, if I heard her coming (you always did), I hid under my desk until she went away. Also, literal. I had a book and everything.
This is not a perfect system, but here are some reasons it's kind of necessary:
1.) the black hole effect of some units; you can't get out because your supervisor sucks so much that the unit gets a bad rep, and the supervisor themselves blocks transfers due to being dicks. These two things don't always go together, but you might be surprised to know there overlap is huge.
2.) some units also are by nature so limited in what they do that even being good at that still means your skillset is abysmal and hard to use out of it. In the state, there are built-in mechanisms for dealing with this, so it's more a matter of patience than actually being stuck there forever.
3.) doomed jobs--this is not common, but it has, does, and will happen and at any given time is happening to a department somewhere--where what you are given to do is over your head (and not by your fault; no one saw that dept would be given X to do and wtf) due to the legislature, politics, internal politics, or just pure bad luck. Especially with these, there are internal mechanisms that do deal with this--not like management isn't aware they are fucking you--but it really is a matter of being patient until the horror passes.
4.) random ass attrition - this is a conservative state, and social services are always first on the chopping block, which is hilarious in a black comedy way which I'll explain later. First line of defense is to basically kill all unfilled positions that exist--there are always a lot where someone left but hte position hasn't been filled for Reasons. Second is to remove existing jobs on a delay; ie, the jobs will be killed when the holder retires, which is actually effective, because most people will retire the minute they are able, take a year or two off, then come back. Third is to actively remove jobs in a delay of about year, wihch gives you plenty of time to go through the stages of grief and get another job.
5.) Rarely, but very consistently in some areas, a supervisor thinks you are too valuable to let go.
6.) Your supervisor/manager does not like you. This is almost never actually problem by itself, because it's really painfully obvious and the type who will do this tend to not do it to one person only in their entire lives, and everyone knows it's happening. In fact, it will be the equivalent of a billboard if they only do it to a single person for three years if you are in a major city, because if anyone is as terrible or whatever as this supervisor/manager says, then why on earth haven't they been fired. It's a problem when attached to one or five.
None of this is unique to the state, but it's not necessarily considered a drawback because a.) state employment can be generational so you've been raised to it and b.) I do not say this in a mean way but in a realistic way--if you work for the state for ten years, hate your job, and can't get out because you have no contacts anywhere else, then you have to be actively working never to meet anyone and actively hostile to those you do. My first two years, against my will, I was interacting one layer of bureaucracy away from the legislature and the office of internal investigations without even leaving my office.
(Note: That was because when my supervisor was in a bad mood I hid under my desk and only interacted with her when it was positive, true, so she thought I was wonderful--she'd never had an argument with me about anything ever! I was so positive and sympathetic!--and my punishment was to have three legislative aids with blackberries awkwardly try to interact with my clients while I interviewed them (me and my clients would kind of stare at each other in mutual embarrassment after each truly painful attempt, and at least a couple of my Spanish speaking ones lost their English entirely the second they walked into my office, which trust me, if I could have done the same thing, I would have. The OIG were slightly more canny about that, but when my clients realized they were there to make me nervous and didn't have any intention of trying to appear benevolently interested in the pain of the poor, they had a blast.)
I mean, there is a reason I've been a tester for a while now. I've applied for only one other type of position a few times, and even at my last interview I wasn't really feeling all that excited at the thought of leaving. Id' rather promote internally in my unit, to be honest.
There's also this: in terms of the level I'm at, I'm still kind of above natural paygrade and will be until I hit at least fifteen years tenure. In state employment, in my job, and for that matter the speed I went from caseworker to tester is not in any way unique, though it's somewhat unusual, I'm years away from being considered for some jobs. It does show; no matter how good I am at my job, there are a lot of people with more tenure and more experience that I can't compete with directly when they look at my resume. My mother didn't get to my level before her late forties and she had massive amounts of experience as well.
More importantly, and this I can't prove but I'm pretty sure is a consideration, is how fast I moved was merited, yes, but not necessarily for the right reasons to move up again anytime soon. A lot of why I interviewed well for tester was, well, fandom, not even going to lie--all my tech experience, understanding of programming, the fact I'd been doing program testing and documentation at my former job because the boredom principle had come into effect and my manager was tired of origami cranes on his desk so gave me something to do. But moving up is now complicated by that.
I was a good caseworker. I know this empirically; my stats, my evaluations, and my merit raises are all documented, so even during my worst days, I can look at my file and know I wasn't just good at it, I was probably the best in my unit and if Events hadn't occurred, I would have naturally moved up to supervisor and then up the regular caseworker hierarchy before getting where I am if I'd ever had a goal as tester. The thing is, I wasn't a caseworker long enough or ever a supervisor. Policy, state policy, is something that as a caseworker you learn down to your bones. By the end, I could--and still can--read an application and accurately tell someone whether they probably qualify for benefits with ninety degree accuracy.
My mother could ask them three questions and know with perfect accuracy.
It doesn't sound like a huge difference, but any caseworker after five years could do that. When I was a caseworker, my worker iv could interview someone while at the front desk and work the entire case in her head in less than ten minutes with their application and a piece of scratch paper if she had to. Any job I want now will be directly competing with people who could do that, and probably were supervisors as well. And for that matter, they know the people who are interviewing; they worked with them as caseworkers.
I don't have a problem with that. Testing is horrifically stressful and I hate some days like you would not believe, and every other build is a nightmare from which I sometimes think I will not awaken. But I love my job itself. I hate that the good is the enemy of the perfect is true, and that I cannot make myself accept that.
* My math says it costs the state more to do this than just leaving everything alone. Like with child protective services, they cut the budget and then there was a rash of inexplicable and really fucking public nursing home and adult and child abuse cases hitting all the papers. People blame the caseworkers, and they should in some of those cases, don't get me wrong here there was neglect of job duties, but what helps is when a workload allows workers to also sleep, and as a former food stamp/medicaid/tanf caseworker, if you were around when I was journaliing about this, sleep was one of the things that I wasn't getting a lot of, and my job at no time had a kid or elderly person's actual life hanging in the balance, just their medical care and ability to eat. After the abuse thing, the state recruited and bonused the fuck out of anyone who would apply and effectively had to spend a lot more than if they'd just left status quo. It cost them a lot with my agency when they treid to eliimiate three thousand jobs and then in horror realized a.) doing that would literally collapse the entire system and b.) before they realized that, everyone retired fast and got better jobs nad wouldn't come back to save their lives. Etnire offices were desperately made up of new hires and let me say, I'd stare at the stats in those offices with an expression not unlike that of a dog doing math; like, what the hell. Also, the state lost money to lawsuits and the feds for pulling that. Like, wow.)
The deployment was tonight, and they already scheduled people to come in tomorrow due to anticipating how badly this is probably going to go. By the grace of God I am not one of them this time.
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From:Very few jobs in corporate America have a generational component, for one; second, we actively recruit from minorities just by existing at the clerk and caseworker level. Not in an anti-racist/equal/social justice sense, but because if your family has been getting benefits for any length of time, you not only know the system, a lot of people want get into it literally because they see sucky caseworkers and want to make it better. And on the social level, if you're committed to the whole helping people thing, it takes a while for overwork to lessen what you get from job satisfaction when every single day you are, quite literally, assuring people get to eat and get medical care. When I interviewed people for emergency food stamps, I knew without a doubt that they were getting their EBT cards adn going to the grocery store and getting to eat that night.
For as long as I was a caseworker, I recruited the fuck out of my clients. I had applications on my desk with a handout for both us and the state hospital and I'd break down the benefits and everything if they seemed interested. A lot of people are completely floored when I tell them how many caseworkers and supervisors were either on benefits or from families on benefits. It's one of the reasons I like the nepotism/experience factors; nepotism hugely benefits people who start off in casework and in this particular arena, it evens out the playing field for minorities and women who are usually educationally disadvantaged. We don't require a college degree until you get pretty high up, and even there, fifteen years experience and having worked with half the agency kills dead a college degree in most non-specialized jobs.
I'm not saying that it's a haven of perfection or the bias doesn't also cause real problems, but there is this; in my testing job, our unit has I think around thirty people (this is weird because of recent changes in hierarchy and contractors, so I'm not sure how some qualify even if they work with us) and only four white males. That is the largest proportion of white males I have ever worked with in almost ten years with the agency; the majority is usually female and usually Hispanic and Black females from the same poor to lower working class background I have. My experience is not universal, but it is also far from unique when it comes to social services.
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From:Sarah's stuff is more complicated by the fact that she's a civilian in the police department, which has a whole other icky layer slathered on top of it, but her father was a contract programmer for Social Security before he retired, and it's the same thing there.
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From:It helped a lot with clients who were tense or new to social services or had bad experiences before and were hostile, which honestly, a lot of them had every reason to not trust me or anyone.
Sarah's stuff is more complicated by the fact that she's a civilian in the police department, which has a whole other icky layer slathered on top of it, but her father was a contract programmer for Social Security before he retired, and it's the same thing there.
Complicated would be a word for it. I'm currently kind of awed by just imagining what she deals with just on a daily basis.
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From:Tell her that she's amazing for me, would you? Because that is breathtakingly so.
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From:mind you, it's probably a lot like the not-for-profit sector here, too -- everyone knows someone because it's a small circle, because you get exposed to the career through limited ways (family members using the service, friends/family working there, and... there's a few who come through general advertising but word-of-mouth is a big thing), and once you're in, it's a fairly inclusive group.
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From:I live in Texas too, and it scares me every time I see one of those cases on the news because they're talking about 4, 5, hell, 8 kids being removed from a home...but nobody I talk to in the foster parent network is being placed right now, at least not by DFPS (who I was licensed by) and supposedly not via private agencies (who I'm trying to get licensed by). Where are these kids going?
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