moonbeanie

I was once accidentally sent all the feedback that people gave about me for a performance evaluation. Some of it was good, some of it was brutal, and some of it was so off base that I never trusted those particular people again. As a result of the soul searching that event caused I left that job because I realized I wasn't performing to my own standards anymore. Seeing the unvarnished truth about what a bunch of people think about you can be an eye opening experience.

Are you a supporter of president Trump? If so, please explain.

In Ben Rich's book "Skunkworks" he talks about the invention of "Stealth" technology as it exists today. This happened under President Carter, and I've always believed it had a lot to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once we could fly nukes in there with impunity the game was pretty much over, Mutually Assured Destruction aside. The Soviets, if nothing else, simply didn't have the financial resources to respond. Reagan is always credited with "Ending the Cold War" but I think Carter should get a lot more credit. What are your thoughts, and do you agree or disagree? Thank you.

I was really burnt out at the time and my Dad was dying of cancer so I quit to help him. I think the reviews accurately reflected the fact that I was coming to the end of the road with that company. I'd made a bunch of decisions that, looking back across time, were completely correct and I got raked over the coals for them. It took a long time to unwind that part of my career and in the end I decided it was a mixture of my behaviors and other people's perceptions run through the filters of their lives. Some of what people said rang completely true, for good and for ill, but yeah, I've decided that performance evals, especially in a company that does forced relative ranking, are largely horse shit. Over the years I got called out for not getting upset enough, making things "look too easy", etc. I think my favorite was "we really love your results but we don't like your process, you don't seem engaged enough". My final take on the whole thing was that it was the wrong company for me to be at, it was becoming destructive to me as a person. I still know a fair number of people from those days and they all have some level of PTSD from the place, it was a harmful environment.

Oddly enough they contacted me and hired me back as a contract engineer a few years ago because I was the only person they knew of who could do something they wanted done. I went in, took their money, did my job, and hated every minute of it. They even had the gall to give me a performance eval (in which they said "there were no negative remarks, we've never seen that before). I couldn't have cared less what they thought of me, as far as I was concerned the whole thing was entirely transactional at that point.

And now that I'm in my 60s I really don't care what most people think. I do good work, when I'm in an office environment I make it as pleasant as possible for everyone I work with, I don't waste other people's time, and I do my best to be a decent human. I try to be a consummate professional in all aspects of my job, I can't really do much more than that.

Sounds to me as though he underestimated the requirements of the outbound shipping and order processing departments. I used to be a factory designer and the inbound, process, and outbound sides all need to be sized correctly (as I'm sure you already know) or you're throttled by the slowest part. And the outbound side needs to be tied to inventory control or you won't know what you've got in WIP and inbound storage.