Category: Job Experiences

Even *I* recognize this as overuse of the passive voice

I’ve been yelled at by English teachers, co-op work term report markers, and Microsoft Word for overuse of passive voice. Mostly I look at the sentence or paragraph they’re yelling about and say “what? I don’t see what’s wrong with it”. But even I recognize this as too much.

From a job ad on Monster.com:

System design, based on the requirements and the development of diagrams along with implementation of the computer language will be part of this Software Development position. Determining testing requirements followed by unit and regression testing will be performed in this role.

Corporate Culture

The culture here is in most ways much more stolid and constrained that at any other place I’ve worked at. The dress code is strict, the hours you can work are tightly controlled, etc. Maybe it’s the lack of other outlets, but one thing that’s curious here are how it seems like every day there is some excuse to have a pot-luck pile of food at somebody’s cubicle. Usually it’s a birthday, today it’s some student finishing his work-term and going back to school. It’s very odd. And fattening.

Kill me now. Or better yet, kill him now. With fire.

A guy moved into a nearby cube a few weeks ago. Just now I had to go over to tell him to “keep the humming down a bit”, because it was getting increasingly loud and atonal. So now he’s started drumming.

How long do you think it will be before he starts using his speaker phone to talk to somebody two cubes over?

I’m getting flashbacks to Blue Lobster and Global Crossing.

History to repeat itself?

It’s always been said about me that I can irmprove a workplace by leaving it.

Several years ago I worked at a small start-up called “Blue Lobster Software”. I’d accepted a salary about $15K less than I should have, along with stock options, thinking I was going to make it big on the stock options like so many people were doing at that time. After a year and a half or so, they got bought by SAGA Software, a former division of “Software AG”, a German company (SAGA originally was an acryonym for Sofware AG America). “Finally”, I thought, “it’s going to pay off”. Well, the first disappointment was that the stock options ended up only being worth about $2K. The second disappointment was that the new owners immediately made us sign new contracts with them, at exactly the same salary as we’d been making before (but no stock options this time). I said “that’s bullshit”, and immediately left, getting a job at Global Crossing within a few weeks.

As soon as I left, SAGA sent out a memo to all the remaining employees saying that the initial contract we’d signed was just to tide us over until they could review salaries, and within a week or two they’d given everybody who stayed big raises. Nice of them to tell them that *after* I’d jumped ship, eh? A couple of the developers thanked me for pushing them to give the raises sooner rather than later.

So flash forward to the present, where there are 4 or 5 of us on contract here at Kodak who’ve been getting jerked around over getting permanent offers, and getting our contracts renewed month to month at the last possible minute. And I’m about to jump ship, coincidentally to Global Crossing again. Who wants to bet that before my notice period is up, they find a way to make permanent offers to the other people who are in this boat?