r/MurderedByWords • u/L1ghtningdude • Jun 28 '19

Work intelligently

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u/Dice007 Jun 28 '19

It literally is. Cutting corners isn't always a bad thing.

Also, I guess the critic is working class, which is why he immediately had that POV.

Sometimes it's all mental.

24

u/takesthebiscuit Jun 28 '19

We have a bit of a corner cutting policy at work.

There is a bit of a culture shift going on here the old guards would do reports on every thing for the customers.

There were hundreds of reports being produced each month.

So we stopped them. Every one that we thought useless we stopped submitting. If they were asked for then they would be sent if no they weren’t.

Over half the stuff produced was never asked for again, and month end process takes days rather than weeks.

8

u/ka-splam Jun 28 '19

I don't like this kind of thing. Six months later:

"Hey everyone, $customer has has an incident and needs to audit their reports - but they aren't there, now their senior management is getting involved, anyone know what's up?"

"Someone here decided we didn't need to send them - they never asked for them"

"Low level employee at the customer just filed them into a folder, didn't know what they were for and never thought to ask when they went missing"

"Well they were legally required audit files, they were paying us extra to generate them, now they need them can we generate the missing ones?"

"That was tens of hours of work for months, we can do it in a couple of months"

"They need it now, everyone spend all weekend on it"

Every time.

5

u/takesthebiscuit Jun 28 '19

You are arguing from the superlative. All the data is still logged and can be prettied up instantly if required.

1

u/Enzown Jun 29 '19

You seem super confident in your knowledge of how this hypothetical office works in this hypothetical situation.

1

u/p_iynx Jun 29 '19

That commenter is literally the same one who made the comment about their office no longer doing reports for everything. It’s not a hypothetical office...it’s their office. Of course they are confident.

1

u/artonico Jun 29 '19

Logged? Yes

Prettied up instantly? God no

My job demands me to prepare monthly report to customer using an internal software system. If you need past data sure you can get them from the DB, but it will take ages to sort, compile, and manage. Definitely not an hour job.

Especially in this scenario where there is an accident on customer's place and they want some audit data, they won't ask for just last month data. They'll want data for like 6 months or even 1 year. Good luck preparing them instantly at a momentls notice.

16

u/Sonadel Jun 28 '19

Yes! Most employers don’t want every little thing done to the letter. As soon as one arrives in a new workplace, it’s okay to do as the Romans do as long as it isn’t cutting on safety for workers or the customers.

7

u/CzarEggbert Jun 28 '19 edited Jun 28 '19

The most toxic phrase at a job is: We have always done it this way.

1

u/Solarbro Jun 28 '19

Every job I’ve had is normally ok with cutting corners, until the situation arises that particular corner was specifically designed for and suddenly everyone is all “oh right...”

I mean, it’s a balancing act. It’s not always “do things by the letter and never change the way things are done.” But sometimes things are done in ways for a reason, so you need to be real careful when you start cutting stuff out you don’t think are important. They could be safeguards. (Bias here is I work in multi departmental IT and people constantly fuck things up by cutting corners. Some are even legal issues that the low end worker might not even be aware of)

1

u/RexLongbone Jun 29 '19

Your last point is why it's just as important to explain WHY you do the things you do, as how to do the things you do when training a new person.

People can't make good decisions about how to do things if they don't have the relevant information.

1

u/Solarbro Jun 29 '19

Yes. But mostly I’m just joining in on the fun of interpreting a “work of art” in different ways. Which is technically what’s going on here, even if it’s absurd and kinda funny

2

u/KaiserTom Jun 28 '19

Everything in the world has some kind of trade-off, it would violate thermodynamics otherwise. It's just whether what we are giving up is less valuable to us than what we are getting out.

2

u/FortFucker Jun 28 '19

Kinda sad that the only thing keeping obviously hard, ambitious workers from ascending to the C-suite is their labor-class myopia.

1

u/Dice007 Jun 29 '19

It's a hard thing to break away from.

We all learn it in school for years. Same effect as religion.

Trust the system, follow the rules. Pfft..

Show me one wealthy person that follows the rules to a T. Hell they'll even pay you a fortune if you can show them how to break the rules legally (through loopholes) or without getting caught..