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Admin
Wow. All comments mentioning the Flickr CC license violation for that bench photo have been removed. That's some bullshit there.
Admin
Guise.
You seem to all get the impression that finding a new job means replacing the current one.
When the current one means zero work, what is stopping you from having two jobs?
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Really. Where is the WTF on that? You get to do your own things (if you're not working side jobs, you're crazy) AND you get a steady paycheck?
We should all suffer this misfortune. Where do I apply?
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duh, she is a PM (or at least wants to be) who can't code in VB .... which open source project did you have in mind ?? :-)
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And deleting the posts about the copyright fail, but not the spam comment about sweatshirts and gloves is extra-super-bonus bad.
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Actually we resolved it. Kai emailed Alex, we apologized for the oversight. Attribution is in the alt tag of the image.
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They aren't paying top dollar for experts. They're paying top dollar for the appearance of experts.
My sister graduated from an Ivy League school, and a lot of her former college buddies are now working at these sorts of consulting firms. The basic gig is that these kids are paid very very well to travel around the country flaunting their Ivy League credentials and giving PowerPoint presentations to various bigwigs about topics they know little-to-nothing about. They offered no practical benefit whatsoever, but did allow the person who hired them to prove that he had outside experts that demonstrated conclusively that his budget needed an increase at the expense of a rival's budget.
It's a very good gig if you can get it and don't mind living out of your suitcase.
Admin
I've never worked there, but for everything I've heard about it, it's Andersen Consu... I mean, Accenture.
Admin
Actually TRWTF is using "alt" tag instead of "title" Oh wait. Very clever way to hide it!
Admin
Why did you remove my comment voicing legitimate criticisms of the way the photo licensing thing was handled? Let me guess: "Editorial Discretion". My points were (in a less sarcastic tone):
Leaving the original comments allows other readers to learn how to handle other's intellectual property.
Giving credit in the alt attribute will not even be noticed by most non-IE users because other browsers doe not render alt attributes as tool tips. Additionally, putting the URL in the alt attribute makes it virtually unusable without viewing the page source.
Admin
Alt is the correct attribute to use if you want your pages to be accessible. Title just gives that tool-tip that's a little daft if you ask me.
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Using "alt" for accessibility would mean actually describing the image, ie. "Wooden bench in front of a green wall".
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Hopefully, I didn't asked
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There are places to go other than work and home? Oh, you must mean the computer store!
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It's Friday. Where's "Error'd"?
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TRWTF
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I'm done with this site. Comments being removed that called for attribution for an image is really lame. Nice knowin' ya.
Admin
Except that attribution was later given, things were resolved via e-mail, and all is well... if you'd bother to read. Good riddance. ;)
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Please... a year with no work and full pay - at a consulting firm, in an economic downturn - I call B.S. !
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How did that yearly performance review go, I wonder?
Admin
Depends on if you're hired to talk (flaunt credentials, give presentations, etc.) or if you're hired to work (design/develop code, fix bugs, etc.). There are lots of different kinds of consultants.
I saw too many times when an "expert" was sent in to work and spent their time learning the technology while billing the client. And I think we've seen a lot of stories of that on this site as well.
Admin
Ha ha! Just kidding. I'm back.
Admin
Sally: You told me I would be benched, and that you would call me. Guess it took you that long to call me.
HR: So you just waited for us to call you?
Sally: Yes.
HR: Unfortunately, we don't have any assignments available, so you'll have to be benched again. We see that you handled it well, so we really hope you don't mind.
Sally: No problem. (YESSSS!)
Admin
Not a bad guess, but it's hard to be certain. Another possibility: Halliburton.
The only thing that is clear is that the customer was government.
Admin
Reading this made me wonder how on Earth the Soviet Union morphed into this company, 'cause damn, paying workers to goof off and do nothing was pretty much the M.O. over there for a while.
Admin
... yea agree with the first post. That seems like a nice job to me. Being able to do what you want and get paid for it. Just like being an on-call consultant. Might not know when you need to move and do things, but basically being paid a retaining fee there. Just start your own internet business or something in "spare" time.
Admin
I want to work for this company!
Well... "work".
Admin
Looks like the perfect job to work on your startup. And you can even work for yourself all day long (or whenever you fancy to). That's perfect.
Admin
To all the government bashers out there, remember that Wally is based on a real person who worked at PacBell with Dilbert's creator!
I have met Wally's soul mates at several large corporations over the years. Most of the corporations are still in business too.
Admin
It'll not harm coder - to work at home(even without direct order, I can find a lot to be done until next decade), but for PR person some interaction needed definitely.
Admin
I dont see anything strange here. Wasnt she a manager? Managers do nothing. If only all of them would stay home instead of come in to work to fuck things up whle doing nothing of value. >.<
Tho, srsly, if I had a job like that, I'd be either at the local university to grab some more skills, or working on some private project. Probably making a game or building a house or making my own car from scratch.
Admin
This could have been IBM up through 2009 but they have a "bench management" program now that looks at anyone on the bench after 8 weeks.
Admin
Devil's advocate: Once you've been required to sit on the bench for 8 hours a day, for over a year, actual work can be very intimidating. If you consider it study time, work on open source, or otherwise keep yourself occupied productively, it's no problem. Of course, as people point out, depending on the skill set, this can be challenging, because you cannot make any commitments. (Some charities can handle that - others cannot.)
On the other hand, if you managed to avoid layoffs for two years by looking busy with the obsolete equipment store, anything more technical could be overwhelming.
Even after 6 months of mostly not working, I found it a little intimidating to be able to do real work. I'm not one to give in to intimidation, so I never morphed into one of these people. However, I can see how it could be easy for it to happen.
Of course, there are people who are just like that. And that I can't explain.
Admin
As The Dark Lord pointed out later, to an extent, it's a matter of resumes matching. As a unix sysadmin and C/C++/Perl programmer, with slight non-professional experience in dozens of other languages, I spent 3 months on the bench (with a week on a different bench in between).
In that three months time, most of the sales calls were for projects that had been canceled even before I arrived - it just took time for the word to run down to the manager hiring the contractors. I only went to a single sales call for a project that wasn't canceled before I arrived. That was a call for 15 'sysadmins' that turned out to be for 1 DNS guy, one sendmail guy, one LDAP guy, etc. 16 roles in all. Unfortunately, I only matched up experience-wise with one of the positions, and a friend fell in to the same category. That position was a 1 hour commute, my friend loved driving, and I didn't, so I let him take it.
It's not that there wasn't work for unix guys - it's just that all the actual unix admin work that came to our company for that period, other than the stuff described above (and more like it that other unix admins on the bench at my company got), either came with a name attached ("Doug did a great job on project Foo, we want to hire him to work on project Bar"), or the sales call happened while I was on another sales call. (I was always the first to go - we were all required to be "sales call ready" in 5 minutes, which meant most everyone left their suit coats and ties in their car. I made a point of being interview ready less than a minute, which meant I could lock and stow my laptop, pop a breath mint, and straighten my tie in that time.)
That having been said, there were guys who greatly resembled your comment. One guy had been on the bench for 3 months when I arrived, and when I later returned after working for 3 months, he was still there (total time on the bench: over 9 months). He was also interview-ready in under a minute, but where I jumped at going on sales calls, he waited until minute 4 before starting to prepare. (At least, that was his claim - I never saw him actually prepare, nor did I hear of it happening from any of the Windows guys.) This individual was let go after he was on the bench for 11 months. He was given a warning during my third stint on the bench, so he knew it was coming.
Admin
Poor Sally, hanging out in Newtown Square, PA with nothing to do.
Admin
A friend of mine worked for IBM. He was only on the bench for about 6 months after he was first hired. It was otherwise basically as described - he wasn't required to do anything except be available and not work for another company, and he got paid.
Then one night, while I was over at his place, he got a call from IBM. They asked him to pack immediately and head straight to the airport, and I almost didn't see him again for another 6 months, during which time he worked on something like 15 different projects and averaged around 75 hours per week. Then he was benched for a few weeks, and then gone for another year. As most of my circle of friends at that time were contractors or consultants, this wasn't that horribly unusual to us. The big differences were that he didn't have to drive in to IBM when he was on the bench, and when he was working, it was virtually never local - the only local gig I recall him having was back-to-back with another job, such that they were still able to say, "we're flying a consultant in from..." Also, I seem to recall he was required to stay in a hotel for that duration.)
Any VB contracting C is going to have some excessive benching cases happen. The higher quality companies will actually pay the people, as a way to retain higher quality talent. The lower quality companies, like Manpower, won't, so most of their people will be relatively untalented.
Or where you complaining about the sending of a PM instead of a VB developer?
That can also happen. There's quite a few competent people with diverse backgrounds. The friend I mentioned above had only listed C++ and Java on his resume, because he was weak in his other languages. However, they sent him on numerous other assignments; he quickly learned he needed to ask what the main tech for the job was going to be, so if needed he could buy books at the airport, and read them on the plane. Not enough time to become a master, but sufficient time to become much more skilled than some of the conslutants I've had the mispleasure of working with.
It really shouldn't happen on such a drastic skill set difference - but many PMs were developers before they became PMs, so it could be worth a gamble. However, I wouldn't want to make that gamble on a PM that was fresh out of college. Unfortunately, if Sally's age was not known by those giving out assignments*, or if she had been an 'older' student, they may have assumed that she'd dropped her developer details off of her resume as many PMs do to avoid being brought back in to coding against their will. And everyone can do VB, right?
Admin
PCubed?
Admin
Hey wait a sec... I just noticed you're using MS Sans Serif, Tahoma, or something like that in the slogan.
Addendum (2010-06-21 06:31): The slogan of TDWTF logo, I mean.
Admin
Better than win? Maybe not... remember, this was an 'obscene rate' for someone straight out of school. If it had been up to me, I would have kept my first 'great gig'. Fortunately, it wasn't, and I'm glad I moved on.
As for this young lady, although she was collecting a steady paycheck to do nothing, she was neither
I would have spent the first few months finding a better job on the client's dime, since they apparently didn't expect anything more.
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I've been working for a bank for 5 years now. There is a technical writer that started working as a consultant for the bank 2 years before I started. At first, they had him do all of the documentation for all of the systems in my area. He finished that before I started. Since then he averages about 80 total hours of work a year. The manager at the bank keeps him because he 'may' be needed and doesn't think he'll ever have the budget to get another technical writer.
He comes in every day, takes his long walks, and leaves early. He has been really productive with his 'time off' and has written 2 fiction and 2 non-fiction books.
I asked for him to help document changes to a system I am working on and he said no.
One more thing, for the first couple years he would complain to me that he hadn't gotten a raise from the consultant company he works for. Now I don't listen to the complaining since he should be happy he's getting paid at all.
Admin
"I am pleased to report that I was not given a single assignment that I was unable to complete on schedule, and that there have been no complaints about the quality of my work."
Or perhaps: Sally maintained excellent posture while sitting on the bench doing nothing.
It would be rather unfair for management to fault an employee for doing exactly what she was told to do.
Admin
I've had it happen to me. Switched employers and after my last day at my former employer I didn't have a job with the new employer (consulting).
So I called them and they told me to sit on the bench (ie. stay home). At first I thought this would be a temporary situation, but after a few failed or cancelled interviews I started to get bored. So I did some studying at home and got some extra certifications. After 3.5 Months I finally landed (a crappy) gig at a client and since then I did several succesful projects at different clients. I still don't understand why it took so long to find the first client ?
Fun part was though : I did not only receive full pay while staying at home, but due to contract reasons I got overtime for every week I stayed at home !
Admin
Sounds like my job. Only I got a 10K bonus yesterday for doing such a good job.