4mo ago

Interviews

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I was that more focused and productive person at two jobs. I answered customer emails at a bank and they actually had a meeting about me because my numbers were like 30-50% better than everyone else's. They thought maybe I wasn't actually DOING my work. I was, I was just good at it and quick at typing and copying and pasting and using templates. I streamlined all sorts of stuff to make my job easier. "How are you doing so many emails?!" "CTRL C and CTRL V and templates" "oh"
- Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.
  So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.
  He's super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he's done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said "Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line."
  So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he's able to be the most productive person they've ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss' boss because they are super impressed. I said "No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They'll eat that right up." He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.
  Don't ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
  
  Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.
  I think you're usually legally obligated to. I mean, crappy boss never ask is one thing, but if they inquire how you do your job, which templates you use etc, the employer owns the templates you created during your paid work time on probably the computer which is also the employers property. You don't have to throw every detail about how you do your job on the table yourself if no-one asks, but if they do you should or they'ld win any legal dispute and you could be fired on bad (financial) terms. Likely whatever you show and explain is still to "complicated" anyhow.
  
  I'm sure laws on this differ everywhere in the world but I assume you're talking US. It is doubtful an employer could win a law suit against you for not showing your specific methodology unless you have a contract and that was part of it.
  As far as firing goes, there aren't very many situations that an employer can't fire you over for cause but obviously also can fire you without cause.
  Would they own the templates? Yeah but they'd also have to know to look for them unless you told them. Otherwise they'd probably already have created some templates and expect you to use and perhaps improve them.

151 comments