Category: Work

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Ironic Inverse Ratio

Years ago, before my employer started its regular “Great Places to Work” program, it maintained a less grandiose practice of occasionally but regularly asking employees for feedback on how it could improve.  At the time I figured this was pointless lip-service, but I dutifully responded with reasonable requests.  One of these requests was for free coffee.

I didn’t expect them to hire a barista, serving Arabica blends.  Of course, I didn’t expect them to seriously consider the request at all.  But after several years, respond they did, and by popular demand installed coffee machines.  And for a good solid month I enjoyed free coffee–nothing great, but a drinkable instant coffee blend.  Quick and effective.

toxic
This is how the work coffee comes in

Then, someone cut costs and changed the blend.  Now, I can drink some pretty awful coffee, but overnight, the coffee had turned into toxic waste.  And toxic waste is probably less bitter–you know, the glowing green kind?  Sadly, I returned to making my own.  But the years passed and the machines remained, so someone had to of been drinking it.  Upon this realization, I started more closely observing who was still getting cups of the sludge.  They all fell into a certain demographic: from Sales, tall, men, middle-aged.  I wondered why successful businessmen were less picky about the quality of their coffee.  Then, I considered my father-in-law.  He is a retired defense-contractor engineer.  He also drinks Folgers.

I wondered: is coffee quality preference inversely proportionate to income level?  To answer this question, I decided to waste time and put off auditing the emails I needed to send out.

To quantify this correlation, I needed figures.  I felt it was safe to assume that the cost of the coffee blend increases with its quality.  What I needed then, were some salary figures.  To graph the slope, I only needed two points.  The first point was easy: take the most expensive coffee I see regularly in grocery stores: $15 a bag; and the lowest income bracket, minimum wage: $15,080.  For the second point, I needed the cost of the cheapest instant coffee available (what I presumed was being used in the machines at work).  Courtesy of Amazon, I found it at $3.33 a bag.  Then, consulting the various online utilities designed to inform the masses that everyone’s underpaid, I found the average salary for an experienced Sales manager to be around $115,000.  Now I had two points.  It was time to calculate the equation.

First, I calculated the cost per ounce of each coffee.  Going off a 12-ounce bag, the expensive coffee was $1.25 and the cheap coffee was $0.28.  But, to make these number more manageable for a formula, I multiplied by 100 to use cents, creating nice whole numbers to work with: 125 and 28.

With standard algebra, we can calculate the slope with (Y2-Y1)/(X2-X1):

(28-125)/(115000-15080)=~-0.000970777, or if you want to follow significant figures, -0.00097.

Following Y=MX+B, we need B to be X0 (in this case, the baseline of minimum wage) to equal the $15 coffee mark.  But first we divide by 100 to bring the scale back down.  After doing so, B is simply calculated to be 140.  Final formula:

((Slope*Salary)+140)/100

Peet'sSadly, I could not find an online calculator that provides coffee products by cost per ounce.  Searching for one only yielded a number of self-righteous articles criticizing how much coffee costs and how stupid people are for buying Keurigs or going to coffee shops.  But I did plug some numbers into the calculator, and my own coffee preference: Peet’s, ranks approximately by cost the type of coffee I should be buying.  So once again, the math doesn’t lie:

https://moorheadfamily.net/data/coffee3.xlsx

Aqua Vitae

–Simon

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Zero Sum

In my prior job, I was a web developer for the company’s internal website.  Specifically, this website’s purpose was to consolidate process and procedural information for the agents on the phone, presumably so that they could quickly research what to do for any given scenario, because remember: time is of the essence!

Now I’ve noticed something about big companies.  An individual job will gradually acquire additional responsibilities until it reaches critical mass.  Then, like a plant’s bulb, the job splits, creating a separate position, related to the parent position.  That’s when the transition is mild.  Sometimes it’s like a star going critical, then exploding into a supernova.

Then something interesting happens, where the plant analogy breaks down: these satellite positions as I’ll call them, remain vaguely defined for a time.  Work is dispersed among them, and they gradually form solidly defined purposes.  But then, a management change occurs.  The new manager, eager to stand out as the new vanguard to change, decides to promote efficiency.  Efficiency is the oft correlate to cost reduction (though I find that debatable), and therefore the new manager combines positions and their duties, eliminating needless processes and jobs along the way.  The remnants of the supernova, having floated in their nebulous form, gradually coalescing from gravity into new celestial bodies, now collapses back into a new star–a facsimile of the original.

This new star remains as such until it again reaches critical mass, but by then the manager who created it has benefited from the transition sufficiently as to receive promotion.  The manager’s replacement sees this star and, eager to stand out as the new vanguard to change, breaks it up into satellite positions.  Attentive readers might be having a “Wait a minute…” moment right now.

escher
Life sure is an ant race

Yes, it’s cyclic.  I’ve experienced having my job redefined so many times that I now expect it as an inevitability.  As a result of this dynamic, my job only consisted of developing the Collections website.  Operations and Fraud had their own team of developers.  Whether or not this was more efficient is an argument left to history, and only a transitory state as defined by those in charge.

Yet, to me it seemed counter-intuitive to have no communication between the teams.  After all, we were doing the same thing, and using the same software.  It was only expected that each of us had differing levels of knowledge which, if combined, could benefit everyone, right?  Not waiting for any management sign-off, as is my way, I initiated dialogs with the other team members.  We began sharing knowledge, with limited success, but eventually my own manager saw the value and started some more formal cross-team discussions.

And all I was after was the sharing of knowledge and information, and to physically sit near each other.  My request for a desk near the Operations team was immediately denied.  Then, as the discussions began to involve higher levels of management, they died.  Some of the changes were minor, like upgrading to HTML5, or implementing RSS update feeds.  But ultimately, sensing stagnation and seeing opportunity elsewhere, I took a promotion and transferred to Marketing.

Two months later, one of the publishers from the Operations team ran into me as I was taking a walk outside.  She confirmed that all movement on the collective ideas had been paused indefinitely, much to her dismay.  Shortly thereafter, I received a group email from higher management confirming this.

Ultimately, I’m just as guilty, for I too benefited from this system.  In the process of pushing for change, I gained the experience and notoriety needed to achieve promotion, leaving my work, and any hope of meaningful lasting change, to atrophy, thus becoming part of the eternal cycle of zero sum innovation.

We are products of our time.  If the right conditions do not present themselves, any idea, good or bad, will fail to achieve fruition.  So it was with this story, but while we may not have seen our ideas implemented, technology forces change, and some version of them ultimately will be.  I’m curious how similar to our own goals they will turn out.

–Simon

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Blaming the Borrowers

borrowersRemember that story with the little people who would steal insignificant items from around the house in order to craft useful tools needed for their survival?  It was a humorous take on the phenomenon of small and low-value clutter vanishing, seemingly without explanation.  It’s an innocent way to cope with the irritations of their misplacement.

Yet, fantasy aside, I notice a certain parallel between this event and the real world, specifically at work.  Why?  This building, a former military structure, might harbor the remnants of tiny X-Files-esque creatures, and that would be a far more entertaining explanation, but the more rational conclusion is that people as a whole posses flexible morals–which is a nice way of saying they’re lowlife thieving bastards.

“If it isn’t yours, don’t touch it.”  It’s a very simple bit of life guidance imparted by mothers upon their children, and then quickly disregarded.  Even in those days, school supplies and personal trinkets would go missing from my desk and wall-cubby–the problem being that personal storage at school had no means of security.  Once the scholarly youth reach a certain age, we apparently begrudgingly acknowledge that their innocence has been lost, and provide them with lockers.  Overnight, this solves the problem of theft.

From this moment on, we’re taught the basics of personal security.  We lock up our houses, cars, computers, and phones.  Any personal item not on our person gets secured.  Digital information receives encryption and access control.  Then we go to work and apparently, we completely un-learn everything we’ve ever learned about security, regressing back to grade school.  We’re issued cubicles which by their very nature are about as low-security as you can get.  And despite the regular lectures we receive about building security, the edifice is apparently so low-security that people have accidentally found their way into it, mistaking it for the courthouse next door, all the while patrolled by a security force too young to even buy beer.

Certainly everything could get locked in desk drawers, but that limits the efficiency of even having a desk if you have to go constantly rummaging.  Also, being human, it’s nice to have a small degree of personal effects upon my desk, such as photos, to remind me why I even come to work at all (it isn’t to fill empty time or to find meaning in my life).  And in my tenure with this company, things have gone missing from my desk.

Now, why do people steal?  I’ve pondered this question, but in the context of an office setting, I can’t think of a better explanation than “I want that”–so basic greed and self-serving motivations.  This isn’t a very interesting concept to explore, as it’s a basal animal reaction to a stimulus, so instead I focus on an observation: not why people steal, but what.

Based on past experiences, I find the items that go missing are valued at around $5 and hold no apparent sentimental value: decorations and office supplies.  These are items which could be requisitioned by the administrative assistants, or purchased at any general retailer, but apparently that’s too much trouble.  I’m assuming people, not without mom’s words of wisdom, have a general aversion to causing others pain, and so limit their thefts to items of low value so as not to cause financial stress, and avoid sentimental items because of the emotional pain their loss would inflict.  In the thief’s mind, the stolen item then isn’t all that important, so there isn’t much guilt involved with the crime, and besides, they could always justify the act as borrowing, like the person who borrowed my ruler…3 years ago? (I’m still waiting for its return).

Life lessons are always bitter.  I’ve learned to limit my desktop to pictures and general office supplies whose loss wouldn’t really upset me.  It’s an impersonal and spartan work environment, unquestionably impacting morale.  Maybe in another 10 years, my pay-band will net me an office.

–Simon

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Irony

You know commercials–those annoying interruptions that beg for attention and cloud the world with digital noise?  Yeah, I only watch Netflix now.

You know web ads–those annoying interruptions that beg for attention and cloud the world with digital noise?  Yeah, I use ad-blockers now.

You know junk mail–those annoying interruptions that beg for attention and cloud the world with digital noise?  Yeah, I filter all such emails to junk and delete them automatically.

Okay, I’m not opposed to their concept, more so their execution.  Commercials have gone to extremes to be loud and annoying, to vie for an emotional reaction rather than provide any product information, not to mention their increasing time slot allocations have broken shows up to the point of being unwatchable.  Web ads are laden with 3rd party scripts, which pose security risks, and creepily track you.  Junk mail just fills up my inbox.

daemon
WTF is he talking about?

Now my wife, who seems far more willing to accept advertisements as part of the way media works (probably a healthier attitude), has no problem with enduring commercials, letting ads track her, and deleting hundreds of emails a day.  But she does have that uncanny ability to multitask tirelessly until blood leaks out of her eyes–an amazing difference in how our brains differ for sure, and something I’ll never understand.  While apparently sitting idle, her thread count resembles that of a malware infection–all those oddly-named daemons no one quite understands.  And boy does she have a lot of daemons …

Heh, Linux joke.  Did I beat that one to death?  Good.

Moving on from my rambling, if you weren’t already aware, I work in Marketing now.  Specifically I manage…wait for it…sending automated EMAILS!

No no, I don’t send spam.  I send carefully crafted messages, coordinated between us as the bank and the merchants as our clients.  There’s also a lot of legal checks in place that determine who can receive emails, as well as various ways to opt-out of the communications altogether.  And besides, as is in the case of my wife, some people appreciate the emails and the offers they contain.

But, me being the cranky old man, as I’ve mentioned, do not care to receive these.  Therefore, it is through a twist of fate that any email campaigns I manage, I also have to personally review.  So while I’ve limited my exposure to marketing emails on a personal level by deleting them, on a professional one, I’m forced to read them anyway.

Cruel cruel irony.

–Simon

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Effort Quotient

There comes a time in every man’s life when he thinks: “Huh, this job sucks.  Why am I here?”  And it is indeed a very good question.  Blessed not are the proletariat masses who punctually arrive at work, only to question the work they do, and by extension, the meaning of life.  But rather than pass a joint and write poetry, I will continue my series on Quantitative Philosophy and instead enlist the field of mathematics to answer these questions.

Actually, I’m just going to calculate whether or not your job’s compensation is sufficient for its level of stress, and subtly suggest whether or not you should seek alternate employment.  How will I do this?  Why, the same way I compile data for all subjective forms of human existence: polls.

And don’t you judge me, all you MBAs out there.  In my experience, employers have carefully calculated just how little they can pay for a given job, and they do this well, otherwise we wouldn’t have minimum wage laws.  This is merely an extension of that philosophy, only calculated from the employee’s side instead.

minumwage

We will start with a job’s variables that make it less desirable, or as I will translate: things which cause stress (Stress Factors).  Through discussion, the common complaints and therefore sources of job stress are:

  1. Superiors
  2. Suboordinates
  3. Customers/Clients
  4. Coworkers
  5. Self (Internal stress, related to self-actualization)
headvice
This albatross is experiencing job-related stress (‘BRING ME THE EPIDERMAL TISSUE DISRUPTOR!’)

Financial compensation is obviously the primary negator, but a broader perspective of that is what we do with the paycheck that negates the stress.  Therefore, we start with the weekly net income, and from this figure subtract the negators (or, negators from the negator–double negatives).  Again, using poll data, I have narrowed these variables to:

  1. Weekly gross income of minimum wage (because you have to be making more than minimum wage to have disposable income, and this is a base figure for which we all weigh our financial success)
  2. Weekly estimated cost of alcohol consumption (substitute your drug of choice)
  3. Weekly estimated cost of luxury edibles (fine dining–a universal constant)

The assumption being made is that the minimum required amount of excess finances to achieve happiness with an average stress level of 65% at a weekly net income of $450.  This sets the baseline…or at least it did.  Minimum wage has gone up considerably since I made this calculator, so the explanation is no longer consistent with the math.  Now it appears that for the given salary, a job caps at about 25% the maximum level of stress a job could offer.  This is a pretty low level of stress.  In any case, here is the formula:

(0.14(net income – (sum of negators)))/0.5(sum of stress factors +1))

And as before, the formula is scaled, this time to range from 0-5 (5 being the ideal job), with each stress factor receiving a rating of 0-10, 10 being the most stress.  Inputting my own figures, I receive a 4.33.  Hmmm, I’m not so certain that this has scaled well with time, or if it’s entirely linear.  A job with a maximum stress level appears to only require a weekly net income of ~$585, and I would not be a stock broker for less than $60K a year.  But it does appear that I’m on version 6 of this calculator as of 1/7/16, so it may be due for an update.  Also, it doesn’t account for an area’s cost of living, so adjust the minimum wage accordingly.

In any case, give it a try and find out where you rank.  I can tell you with certainty that if you rank below a 1, scaling issues aside, your job sucks and you need to find a new one (I told you I would give a subtle suggestion).  Now stop reading this and get back to work!

https://moorheadfamily.net/data/Effort%20Quotient%20v6.xlsx

–Simon