sequence
For those of you reading this:
Are you often forced to work overtime for various reasons?
Have you ever been happily ready to leave at the end of the day, only to be called for a meeting that will last until 10pm on an empty stomach?
Have you ever thought that completing a task would end a tiring day, but new needs are like tornadoes? ?
Have you been called out of the blue for a business trip the next day?
Whether after a long period of overtime, but can not get any substantial compensation, or even a “hard” may also bring a @ all members… ?
Warning: Watch with caution for the low-grade rundown below.
The cause of
Back in May, 20, I quit my previous company, which was an educational institution in a non-Internet industry, and went to an outsourcing company (hereinafter referred to as COMPANY J) that seemed to have a small scale in my hometown.
Why does it “look” slightly larger? First of all, I made it a rule in my job search that people who rarely ask technical questions will not go. You might think this is a strange rule: why would a software company not ask about technology? I used to think so too, but after going through a few interviews I have to say that there are always some companies that you can’t predict. Back to the topic, in the interview of COMPANY J, there was one round of written test and two rounds of technical interviews. Although they were all completed on the same day, they were much more reliable in a sense than other companies I had met before. Therefore, I think it might not pit me in terms of technology. But I was still too young.
Second, it is a publicly traded company of 1,000 people. In my mind at that time, it must be a relatively formal and rigorous company with relatively mature and novel technology. Of course, now I have no love for public companies. For such a relatively large company, it is not easy to find it in my hometown, so in my mind at that time, the impression of it is still quite high.
He has the benefits he deserves. Looking for a job in my hometown, I don’t expect any particularly good welfare treatment, I just simply hope to have five insurances, one housing fund and two days off, overtime can have a rest or compensation. During the hr interview, she told me that they would even get a 13 year salary (or a minimum annual bonus of $1,000). This is good news for my low expectations. But as it turns out, that’s not entirely true.
Then, why an outsourcing company? As we all know, many people advise their friends not to go to outsourcing companies. There are plenty of reasons, such as personal growth and long-term development. There are many related posts on the Internet, so I won’t repeat them here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the idea of staying away from outsourcing companies, and I personally hate outsourcing to companies like ****. But why did I go to company J anyway?
Simply put, it’s a very common fluke.
In my opinion, in my hometown, it is not too much to say that 90%+ are outsourcing companies of the type mentioned above. It is very difficult for you to find a software company with its own products (personal opinion, do not represent the real situation). Secondly, I have never actually worked in such an outsourcing company (the main business of COMPANY J is **** project outsourcing), so I decided to give it a try, adhering to the pragmatic attitude of experiencing everything by myself. After all, in my job hunting experience, it is not easy to find a company.
To sum up, after the interview, I finally chose to enter this company.
after
First day on the job, like everyone else, paperwork, then nothing.
On the second day, I began to work overtime. B: Yes, I have to work overtime the next day. At that time, a project was urgent, and I was asked to fix some problems. Then, the overtime lasted for about three days. Of course, I am not an unreasonable person. It is understandable that the project is in a hurry, and I have seriously participated in the problem repair.
Three days later, I was pulled away by another project team whose requirements manager was a woman from the second technical interview. Then she told me to learn how to use Axure because “you might want to prototype later.” At that time I was very strange, I didn’t come in when the development? I asked her, and she told me, “The project is still in its early stages. When the development process starts, the company will replace me with other requirements people and then move me to the development team.” “That way,” she told me, “you’re deeply involved in the requirements phase, and then when you move to r&d, you can sort of solve the requirements for the developer.”
I thought about it, it made sense, and I chose to believe her. Of course, as a new employee, I have no other choice.
So I followed her to a separate room like a small conference room and started working as an office.
Axure wasn’t hard to learn, or at least the basics were easy to use, so I picked it up quickly and did well in the interview, which made me the product manager’s favorite. Of course, don’t get me wrong, the product manager is a great guy, and by “use” I mean in jest to indicate that several of the leaders WHO interviewed me had high expectations of me.
One Tuesday, a week after joining the company, the manager went out to take a phone call and returned with the news, “We may have to go on a business trip tomorrow.”
She said it to me, but there was a man and a woman in the room besides her and me.
I looked at her and thought briefly: Did she mean to accompany me on a business trip? And I said, “Business trip? Tomorrow?”
“Well.”
“… Am I going, too?”
Instead of answering me directly, she looked up at me with a smile and asked, “What do you think?”
I didn’t ask any more questions, trying to suppress my revulsion. Because in my impression, I clearly told her as the interviewer that I did not accept business trips.
But I was so good-natured that I would not refuse her. Anyway, I finally went on a business trip with her. The silver lining was that this (and several subsequent) business trips were all driven by colleagues, so I didn’t have to worry about booking rooms, booking tickets or thinking about expenses.
However, here, business trips are not so idle, although far away, still can not escape the fate of overtime. In a nutshell,
Morning: I had a meeting with party A in a dark conference room with a projector on to determine requirements. My manager was responsible for explaining and asking questions, while I took notes in the dark.
Afternoon: same as morning, but more tired physically and mentally;
Evenings: Most nights will be spent eating dinner with the boss or working on a prototype based on a meeting, or even just returning to the hotel.
In addition, although the product manager said she was a good person, her personality was a little “axis” and she was quite serious, and her ability of expression was not satisfactory. It was very tiring to watch her arguing with the leaders of the other party in different “channels” on the same issue. (Not that I feel that way, it’s a consensus among the rest of us who do requirements)
Anyway, after that, it was a three-day trip almost every two weeks.
One and a half months after joining the company, the leader suddenly got the news that Party A had greatly advanced the acceptance time of the whole project. The specific reasons and process will not be detailed and I do not know much about it. In a word, party A still requires the acceptance of the first version of the software to be advanced from January of the following year to October of the same year even after signing the contract. What if it’s ahead of schedule? Work overtime.
Of course, such a few of us have been numb overtime, after all, I entered the office to now, also only a week is off work on time.
Until two months, nearly three months into the job, I felt a little tired. Working overtime every night and every weekend is one aspect, and the content of overtime is another. Almost every time I worked overtime, I overthrew what I had done in the previous overtime and re-did the work, just because the demand manager misunderstood the meaning of the leader. Of course, this is not entirely her fault, after all, she used to be a programmer, not good at this work, in every sense she is also very stressed.
Anyway, after A little over two months, the requirements phase of the project (hereafter referred to as Project A) was considered major work done. At this time, we plan to take a leave of absence. Of the several people who did the request, one of them went to the office of the big leader to apply for it and explored the way for us (because we didn’t mention it). After a while she came back, but there was no triumph in her eyes. She told us that X always said, “There is no such thing as vacation adjustment in our department. If you want to ask for leave, you must have sufficient reasons”.
Me and many others:
But I remember not long ago, this “general manager” at the weekend when we work overtime said: “we work hard, can take a rest later”.
Anyway, by the end of the third month, as you probably know, I left the company on my birthday. Before I left, when I offered to resign, the “general manager” asked me mockingly:
“Why do you want to leave ah, do requirements than when development has a lot of future?”
Of course, this was not his opinion, but that was the opinion of most people in my part of the world. It is a common belief that one should move from r&d to leadership sooner or later. But at least for now, I don’t want to go down that path.
The results of
During all this crazy unpaid overtime, I’ve been wondering for a while: Where did all my extra work go? No days off, no overtime, just a few perfunctory condolences and sighs that filled the room. We were shut up in a small room isolated from the surroundings of the large office, with no sunset and the bright moon every day. So where did all the extra hours I sacrificed for the company go? Did they really just vanish without leaving a trace?
In Company J, their system is to “register for work” on one of their own systems. You only need to fill in your working hours and overtime hours once a day. Isn’t that recorded overtime, you might ask? But our manager told me that this parameter is completely useless, you can’t even see the statistics, and it has no effect.
In order to recover the time I had lost working overtime, I simply recorded every single one of my overtime records in a cloud database, though only to make it meaningful.
This is not the end. You know, when you quit a job, it means you need to find another one. But in the process of hard job hunting, let me find another thing.
After a simple calculation and the internship, THERE are about two companies where I have worked for more than three months.
The first company, which I worked for during my internship in Beijing, is a project outsourcing company providing big data platform services for universities. As an intern, I didn’t have any exposure to big data content, even though I had to turn the screws there.
The second, an education company in my hometown that trains teenagers, has temporarily opened a software development department. But none of their leaders or colleagues knew anything about the software department, had no management experience, had not hired the right leader for the software team, and had a wide range of requirements. So even though I was involved in 0-1 projects there, there wasn’t any popular technology, let alone microservices, high concurrency, etc., that people like to see these days.
After that, there’s company J, which just left.
Such a barren employment experience, to my job – seeking road brought many ups and downs. During several interviews, the interviewer at one company pointed out several of my pain points:
- There are too few highlights in in-service projects, which are basically screwing the screws;
- Individual projects are too unpopular and not enterprise-wide for many companies to care about.
And so on and so forth. All in all, my experience makes me difficult to stand out, even ridiculous. On second thought, he was right. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years maintaining my framework project, but the nature of the framework is very different from that of a mass enterprise, and no matter how well I design it and how much effort I put into it, it’s hard to keep an interviewer’s eye on it for more than a second. It’s not that we should abandon the pit, but at least we can no longer focus on it.
In fact, I realized this problem for a long time, as early as a year ago. If you write something that doesn’t improve you any more, you’ll end up broke if you put too much effort into it. Fortunately, although the framework projects I mentioned above can always drive me to learn more new knowledge from time to time, they are not conducive to my direct employment. If I were to compare one’s achievements (work experience, mass-market products, enterprise apps) to capital, I would probably be out of business.
What to do? At this point, I remembered the behavior I used to keep track of my overtime hours. The brain is very perfunctory for me to think about it, for me to draw a conclusion: use this theme, do an independent project.