Not the best time to discover a change in company policy
My corporate masters have, apparently, changed certain policies about when you're supposed to be at work. This is not normally a problem; the new policies are "core hours" of 9am to 3pm (with, presumably, a couple of hours tacked to one side or another of these hours to bring my non-hourly-in-theory workweek up to 40 hours a week), and, contrary to what you may have heard about programmers, the starting time is close to the time that I've been going in in the mornings (my previous working hours were defined as "late"; my previous CMs didn't mind if I got in as late as 10am, and even let me occasionally work from home for the start of the day if I had some sort of project underway, but I still managed to get there around 9am most of the time for the standard 9-5 schedule).
But, alas, my corporate masters decided that the most efficient way to tell me of this new policy was to inform me when they told me the results of my review. As in "we're giving you a bad review because you're not adhering to the (never-before-mentioned, hurray!) core hours."
Huh. Now that's certainly an interesting way to manage programmers. It's stupid, but it's interesting, in the sort of way that crossing the beams counts as interesting.
So, is there anyone out there (preferably here, but I'm not picky) who's looking for an open source/linux programmer who's got more experience than he knows what to do with about building and maintaining Unix distributions? Send mail to orc@www.tsfr.org -- I have it on good authority that I'm not ordinarily (quite so much of) a grumpy sociopath, and the miserable state of the US healthcare system means I can't stay in recovery for as long as I'd like (if it wasn't for the pathetic US healthcare system, I could actually retire from full-time employment and become a part-time consultant, but, alas, I still need to work.)
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David, somewhat ironically I am presently taking a course in HR management and one of the first things they tell you in my impressively succinct text is that you don’t use the annual or quarterly reviews to spring new directives on people.
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Lovely. I’ve worked for companies ranging from 11 employees up to 150,000, and managers always find a way to amaze me.
When I worked at ADP, I had a good relationship with my supervisor and manager. I told them up front how I felt about reviews. I told them that I would certainly hope they gave me an objective review, whether that be good or bad. I also told them that meant there shouldn’t be any surprises. If I needed to improve in some area, there is absolutely no benefit in waiting until my review to tell me. I asked them to be up front and honest, and they were. When I got my reviews, there weren’t any surprises. They scored me well on my strengths, and scored me fairly on my weaknesses.
I haven’t been at my current job long enough (less than a month) but I hope things will play out as well here… sorry to hear you have an asshat for a boss.