Hello. My company is going through a merger process, and European Commission appointed trustees will monitor our work starting in January. I'd like to ask a question along the lines of 'Working with a trustee over your shoulder, what is it like?' but it seems a bit subjective. Any ideas on how to improve the question?
It seems fine, but the answer is likely to be "ask your manager" as the remit for these auditors/overseers is going to be specific for your company/role.
For example, are they just going to be watching you work, or will you need to explain and justify your every action?
The thing is, nobody knows. That is exactly the question, are they going to watch me work in the office, are they just going to be in their offices, reading reports we send them, etc.
The only person that can really answer this is your manager. There has to be something at the start of this process that defines how this is going to work and what the expectations are on both sides. Otherwise, it'll just be meaningless chaos.
I am already quite high up the ladder, and I don't have a clue. I have coffee with my manager and his manager every morning, and they are either excellent liars, or as in the dark as we all are. I had in mind an 'experience sharing' question
Yeah, sometimes management don't know stuff either. We currently have three consultancy firms working with us and it's very difficult to know the what/why/how of each of them.
without boring you to tears with dry bureaucratic lingo the plain english version of what they are there to do is to make sure that the business is being operated in a way that the divested business isn't being operated in a way as to sabotage it's value
The question is are they going to be in my office watching over my shoulder, or are they just going to check our calendars, maybe read a few mails, etc.
the other big responsibility the monitoring trustee has is to make sure that confidential information isn't retained by principal, that networks are seperated etc
so if you're role involves dealing with sensitive commercial information of the divested business or if you're in the IT then they are going to be (or should be) paying close attention
and I'd expect that to take the form of monitoring of e-mail accounts etc
similarly if you are in accounting/finance then they'll be keeping a watchful eye on transactions etc
it's not really going to be an over-the-shoulder situation - more a "give them access to things and answer any queries" scenario
I never know when an answer is going to go up like that. It seems when I just simply blurt out what I'm thinking, it's well received, most of the time.
It's just based off how quickly the question becomes upvoted. If it's quick HNQ takes over and based off the title it was too clickbait to not be a success
and since you were already top voted answer at the time it's a given
@IDrinkandIKnowThings sure, if you want to take all the fun out of it ;)
@Twyxz I think what leads to HNQ in many instances is a question where the OP's wisdom is shown to be somewhat lacking, with an answer that opens up a can of whoopass on the OP.
IMO keep your mouth shut until it is time, then ask directly about it. Hey when i signed on we agreed to do a review, do you have time for that in the next few days.
@Nofel I have learned to be very nuanced when I need to be. That's what that book "Brag" teaches as well. You don't want to say "I'm great", you want to say "Wow, I'm excited that I was able to save the company 1 million last year".
@Nofel I'm reading Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life right now. Now that I am finally out of survival mode, I have to get on with this business of actually living life.
although I want to read Robin Sharma's The 5 am club. I so want to wake up before sunrise but my "monkey" is too clever to tell me "go back, its dark and scary"
@RichardU the "doing my job too well?" question? Yeah I didn't bother answering that one as my answer was almost guaranteed to get me a metric ton's worth of abuse
@RichardU Fundamentally that the guy didn't "do his job too well" - he took one problem and turned it into a larger one. Basically an anesthetist solving the possibility of intra-operative awareness by putting patients into a coma for several days instead
I do agree that the manager should be carrying the lions share of the responsibility (and blame)
@motosubatsu I'd agree with you except for the fact that the OP never did anything like this before. Now, under normal circumstances, I'd be lambasting the OP with my usual snark. But, in this one instance, it sounds to me like the OP was asked to do something outside of his job description, and took the specs literally.
@motosubatsu the manager bears the brunt because this was an employee who was not a trainer by nature, but a gamer. Everything you say is technically correct, but the fact that this guy was working out of title, with what seems to be little or no direction other than to make the training fun and to raise scores.
@RichardU I agree to a certain extent..but anyone who has spent more than 5 seconds learning about game design (and remember the OP describes themselves as amateur game designer) should understand the point of a public leader board in a game without hard replay limits
@RichardU agreed.. which is why the manager is primarily at fault, I just can't bring myself to think the OP is totally not at fault when they failed to apply any of their own common sense
If you sent the most junior of office juniors out with the instruction to "buy some milk" you'd expect them to be able to apply some level of reasoning to how much milk
@motosubatsu maybe, but it still got past his manager. Plus, this was his first stab at something like this. I wouldn't go to hard on him, even if I were the manager, I'd be blaming myself. I think it's more of a case of Gone horribly right than anything else.
@motosubatsu Well, if the manager said go out and get some milk, we're having a big breakfast meeting and he brings back 10 gallons because he assumes breakfast means cereal and not just coffee....
@motosubatsu my break would be 90-10, because the guy has no professional experience with either gaming or training. Put someone with zero experience in a position, then get mad when something goes wrong... nah.
@IDrinkandIKnowThings well it was partly reductio ad absurdum but it depends how much "skimming through the courses in 10 mins" was costing the company in lost productivity vs how much it's costing them in the man days where people are excessively playing the game
@IDrinkandIKnowThings I think it's a massive overreaction from upper management as well. If I were in upper management, I'd be more interested in how we could profit from something that became a wildly popular hit. Chalk up any lost time under "lesson's learned", add a time limit, and move on.
@RichardU i put 100% of my money on this is a made up story, or at least they are leaving some key element out of the story... like the OP was never instructed to create a game and just took it on themselves.
@RichardU wildly popular vs doing office work (especially when you can reasonably dissemble that you were doing "work") is a whole different thing from something you could make money out of
@IDrinkandIKnowThings you're likely right. But it has been my great misfortune to have been exposed to some of the most aberrant workplace behaviors imaginable, so I find it hard to dismiss anything out of hand.
@RichardU agreed.. and clearly he has some burgeoning talent, whether it's of any use in his current role, don't know
@IDrinkandIKnowThings I did detect a whiff of "I'm looking for sympathy and for people to tell me how big a dick my employer is", a faint one true, but present.
@RichardU When ever an OP shines the light on how great they are and how horrible they are being treated I want to throw a flag on the play. Especially when the results are beyond any resonable expectations.
@RichardU depends entirely on the nature of the employing business, to use another, somewhat absurd example you could have an employee write the next Angry Birds for you in this sort of scenario but if you aren't even remotely close to that sector business wise it's like giving a Ferrari to a kitten
@motosubatsu then I'd considering pouring through my linkedin contacts to see who needs a Ferrari, and what they'd be willing to pay.
@IDrinkandIKnowThings Like I said though, I've seen some grandmaster dickery in my day, including a man fired for doing his job to well. Yes, really. He had two managers go to his boss and praise him for doing such a great job. He was fired, the union got him his job back for wrongful termination. From that day on, he never stayed one second past quitting time, never did anything beyond his job description for anyone, and never did one iota of work more than was required.
@RichardU which is possible.. but a) you're going to need the experience to realize what you've got (a kitten can't tell a Ferrari's value from a Trebant) and b) have some contacts. Say our firm (kitten) worked in.. oil and gas. How many of their contacts are likely to know any more about said Ferrari then they do?
@motosubatsu I think my experiences are a bit different than most, because I do know people from all walks of life. I'd be able to network the folks together in about ten minutes.
@RichardU I'm reasonably similar in that I've worked in very disparate industries, but a senior manager at say an oil and gas company is likely to know (professionally speaking) a great many people in oil and gas and f-k all else
And that's even before you factor in that something like flash game would likely be translated into a mobile game (if it were being commercialized) and 99.99999999999999999999999999% of those that try that fail, even those made by people who do know the industry
Hey I have a good one there, a friend were inteviewing candidates, fresh out from school. In the middle of the interview, he passed on the hobby part of the CV, a club of music. So he try to pursue there, the candidate detailled that it's a "fart music club" and he had the honor of a live demonstration. Sometimes I wonder how they filter candidates out of school, he got quite some cases but I think this one is really the best he got.
@Walfrat my manager at a previous job had a guy break down in the middle of the interview, start ranting, and eventually stormed off saying "I'm not going to waste any more of your time". The interview was with my team lead in the next cube. I was actually scared of what this guy might do.
well in my case it's more like than I don't know what to do or where I'm going, or if I'am even going anywhere but hey maybe I'll find next year, things are moving very slowly
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