To be thinking f*k this sh*t re work?

@Pollydonia
I believe it was Alexei Sayle who said that anyone using the word “workshop” who wasn’t engaged in light engineering is a knobhead.
So true.

YANBU. If the balance has tipped and the perks don’t make up for the BS it’s time to start exploring your options.

What gets me is that people come in and implement a project that looks great on their portfolio on a surface level but there’s no quantifiable way of judging the success of these changes.

You can put you managed a multi million pound budget, a staff of hundreds and implemented a new IT system but there’s no consideration given to the fact you might have leaked money like a sieve, had a horrendous staff turnover and loads of complaints and your IT system isn’t fit for purpose and is now an active hindrance for the job.

Dido Harding as exhibit A.

Excellent @StellaOlivetti

I’m in my 50’s, also public sector, and just marking down time until I retire. People will say oh but you have 10+ years left to do something different but I can’t be assed! I’m fed up with work full stop. Everywhere is the same. All jobs have a degree of bullshit.

At my age I realised how fast time goes so I don’t need to stress myself out taking on something new, or letting the crap in my current job get to me. I’m lucky to only need to work part time now and the years will fly by, although it’s a bit sad I am somewhat wishing them away!

I’m a very long term temp (my current role is 4 years and counting) so I at least don’t have all the crap like appraisals etc. They’re just for perm staff. My manager leaves me alone (having had micro managers in the past I very much appreciate it). So all in all, could be worse.

You do come over as someone who cares about doing the job well. I was really taking up the point made by others. Improvement doesn't always translate into progression in terms of promotion and I've always felt a bit disconcerted by people who just want to do the minimum to collect their salary and go home.

And I could have written your post, StellaOlivetti.
woop woop!

What does your pension look like, can you retire early

I'm 50 and plan to retire at 58, I'm counting down the months now, I can't wait. I'd much rather not work and have a smaller pension

Why?
People can do 💯 during their working day and then go home.
Rinse and repeat.
Depends on what you think the function of work is.

I talked about people going to work and doing the minimum, not about people giving 💯 to the job. Try reading again.

It's definitely worse when you can see the dim light of retirement at the end of the tunnel. Until then you just have to grit your teeth and grind on. Once you get a faint whiff of freedom all the daily crap becomes unbearable.

The end is in sight OP! Just think if that final salary pension and freedom!

It's unfortunate that in a lot of organisations, people who are doing the job to a high standard and are very skilled but don't want to go into management aren't well accommodated. There can be an assumption that everyone should be looking at the next steps, rather than consistently doing their role well to a high standard and wanting to continue with that.

Without working with you or your team it’s hard to tell if you’re jaded and disillusioned so you’re resistant to change, as you mentioned new people come in with lots of “whizzy ideas” that you object to, or whether their ideas are genuinely rubbish. If there’s only a few people objecting and everyone else thinks they’re great ideas maybe the problem is you and not them? If people are determined to see things fail and are not onboard then new ways of working usually never take off.

I’ve worked in the NHS for 12 years now and I’ve seen a lot of people who have been in the role for many decades who are very obstructive to any changes and find any reason to object to them as they just want to carry on doing things the way they’ve always done them. It’s very frustrating. I’ve never really seen lots of people continually making crap suggestions for improvements though.

Where i used to work the company embraced the "Lean" initiative, bringing an external company in (at a massive cost) and they taught us all the "Lean" ways of working. After a couple of months we abandoned 90% of it and went back to how we used to work and it took 6 months to catch up.

But when the people who work at the coal face make suggestions it is ignored and they prefer to pay external people to tell us how we should be working when we know it will fail.

Just old ideas recycled and repacked with a shiny new box. All bollocks.

It's hard to say. Some change is helpful and some isn't. Some change is well handled and with clear objectives and some isn't. Some people understandably get change fatigue after plenty of poorly handled change. Some people hate any change. So it depends...

I think that many people, particularly once you get beyond a certain age, all you want is to get the job done well, and then go home.

That's the stage I'm at, anyway. I've had the career, and I don't want to progress into another one, with promotion, targets and all that malarkey. I just want to turn up, get the job done and go home again. I'm skilled at what I do, and I'm happy doing it. Just leave me alone until I can retire. Which would have been next week if they hadn't gone and fucked with the retirement ages, so this is rather a sore point with me at the moment.

Where in this thread did anyone mention minimum effort?
They mentioned management speak and management appraisals being cobblers.

Try to stop being passive-aggressive.

PMSL, were you in the same meeting as me before school yesterday? I was kicking myself for not setting up bullshit bingo beforehand because just about everything was in there: metacognition, various "big thinkers", blah bloody blah. The guy doing the talking is a nice chap and good teacher. I've done a couple of trips with him and he's fair and a good sport. But talk about reinventing the wheel!

Every September I look at the new keenies on the staff and have a personal wager as to which is groomed for stardom. Sometimes, there are some really lovely and talented people. Mostly, they need to learn their classroom craft first before they start telling me how to do my job. I can silence a room of lively year 9s by raising an eyebrow, followed by a steely glare. I never bother raising my voice. Yet they think they can lecture me on how to deliver something they haven't actually done themselves... Roll on retirement.

After 30+ years of appraisals in a huge number of jobs - they are all wank.

Either the job has changed to fuck since we set the objectives (quite often) so they just look stupid, or the feedback is "you did a great job but there's no money for any payrises" so fuck that.

@ilovesooty
I've always felt a bit disconcerted by people who just want to do the minimum to collect their salary and go home.
Why?

I mentioned doing the job at minimum level which was my interpretation of some of the posts describing wanting to go in, not engage with anything promoting improvemt, and go home again. If you didn't understand that, your lack of comprehension is not my responsibility.

This is a brilliant article about how many of us are expected to do the work of at least three people -

Because I've always worked in environments with vulnerable people and it was generally accepted there that there was some going above and beyond. Perhaps if my work environment had been different there'd have been more acceptance of a culture where people turned up, just did the minimum and went home.