Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes to.

[The Rube]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

You didn't specify. You only said the state.

As you say...BOX.

Meh. Artistic license. Rebox.

 

[Patman]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

tough day at work... I feel betrayed... the work I did over the last two years which was beyond the pale and somewhat unprecedented counts for squat for promotion and advancement because I'm a "researcher"... development counts for nothing... I have to produce scientific research. Let's ignore that the institution didn't have the stones to execute what I did... no, only academic papers and talks count. So, why the hell did they have me do all that? I have no incentive to do development and consulting... aside from the nominal end of the year bonus... and at this point it is nominal. No point in going to the ends of the earth for it... it doesn't get me another dime.

Yeah, I'll be looking for a new job. Only a true idiot would go to the government if he didn't have other options. Do the impossible and get nothing. I shouldn't have to wait another few years to achieve parity with the average entering salary. Above average work, below average reward. I really don't want to leave... but its a matter of respect. I am not working longer to strive to mediocre.

They wonder why nothing ever advances. The production don't have the talent of the researchers in order to develop things and the researchers have no incentive to develop. If I had known the way I was being measured I would never have agreed to what I did.

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Gotta do what you gotta do. If your efforts aren't respected, then screw 'em.

I'll be starting to look again in September if my current employer doesn't recognize everything I've done with a serious raise. A perfunctory 5% and an excellence bonus is not going to cut it for another review cycle when they low-balled my salary to begin with.

 

[The Rube]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

I dream of 5%. Although, I've been getting preferential treatment that is worth it in lieu of money. One of the off-site positions, for example, has saved my sanity numerous times.

 

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

It's similar for me. I love the casual environment, the "west coast" flex time, and I like most of the people, but they're shorting me $5,000-10,000 a year what I'm worth. My immediate supervisor knows it, and if not for him, I probably wouldn't have gotten that 5%, since the budget for our team was mostly set back in October. However, I'm pretty sure he and I will have to battle the VP for anything more than another 5% when the next six-month review period is up.

 

[Bakunin]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Money isn't everything. If you're making enough to be comfortable and don't totally hate your job, your co-workers, and/or your supervisor, you should count your blessings.

Patman, the government is wonderful at providing stable / secure employment. If you do just enough to get by, it's the perfect place to stake out a career. However, if you have any inkling of going above and beyond your job duties and want to move up the ladder, you will be sorely disappointed and frustrated. Promotions and advancement simply aren't correlated to how well you are doing your job. I've seen far too many examples over the years of people sliding into positions of authority simply due to what appears on the surface as an all too cozy relationship with management. If you dare speak your mind or challenge the people in power, you're going to remain stuck exactly where you are until someone else takes charge. Such is life.

 

[bigmrg74]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Just went for the first bike ride of the year. The only thing I took from that was just how far out of shape I am. I got a lot of work to do this summer.

You should go out and do the Kiwanis trail there between Adrian and Tecumseh. Nice easy and flat for about 8 miles, and its decent countryside to go thru. Me and the GF hiked it earlier last month when we had that rash of 80 degree weather. Would be pretty easy to do a there and back on it, without having to worry about some idiot on a car for most of the way.


Up right now, wondering which idiot neighbor of mine is burning trash at 2 in the morning. Caught a whiff of it and went out to check to make sure it wasn't nothing out in the barn burning. stinky shibby.

 

[MarkEagleUSA]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Good morning to tLodge!

 

[Ralph Baer]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Good Morning, MEUSA!


Good Morning to the rest of tLodge !

 

[mookie1995]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

s'upp y'all

 

[MissThundercat]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Good morning, Lodge!

 

[JF_Gophers]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Morning Ladies!

 

[Ralph Baer]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Money isn't everything. If you're making enough to be comfortable and don't totally hate your job, your co-workers, and/or your supervisor, you should count your blessings.

Patman, the government is wonderful at providing stable / secure employment. If you do just enough to get by, it's the perfect place to stake out a career. However, if you have any inkling of going above and beyond your job duties and want to move up the ladder, you will be sorely disappointed and frustrated. Promotions and advancement simply aren't correlated to how well you are doing your job. I've seen far too many examples over the years of people sliding into positions of authority simply due to what appears on the surface as an all too cozy relationship with management. If you dare speak your mind or challenge the people in power, you're going to remain stuck exactly where you are until someone else takes charge. Such is life.

Different agencies run things differently, but I suspect that for researchers pay is always less than outside. As you said, you have to balance that with the relative secureness of the job, but that could always change.

Where I worked, referreed publications were the primary thing that was looked at for promotions if you did not get into management. At some point they started figuring in how many other papers (external to the lab) referenced the papers that you wrote.

Not knowing what Patman means by development, I can't comment since what some call development others call research.

 

[Lady wore Black]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Good Morning, Lodge!

 

[bostonewe]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Then there's saltimbocca -- cheese wrapped in prosciutto wrapped in thin veal, all rolled up and sauteed to a crispy, fatty, cheesy goodness -- which means "jump in the mouth." Mmmmm . . .

Final exam day today; naturally I barely slept and I got terrible news about work yesterday. I'm a ball of joy this morning. I even dreamed that my sister was captured and nearly taken out to sea by a colossal squid (dang Discovery channel and their interesting programs).

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Gotta do what you gotta do. If your efforts aren't respected, then screw 'em.

I'll be starting to look again in September if my current employer doesn't recognize everything I've done with a serious raise. A perfunctory 5% and an excellence bonus is not going to cut it for another review cycle when they low-balled my salary to begin with.

This was me about 8 months ago. And since then my company definitely came through for me. 13% raise (1 salary grade higher, plus an additional merit increas), and an extra week of vacation 2 years earlier than expected. Hopefully yours does something similar, it is nice to know that someone is noticing all of the work that you're doing.

 

[Patman]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Money isn't everything. If you're making enough to be comfortable and don't totally hate your job, your co-workers, and/or your supervisor, you should count your blessings.

Patman, the government is wonderful at providing stable / secure employment. If you do just enough to get by, it's the perfect place to stake out a career. However, if you have any inkling of going above and beyond your job duties and want to move up the ladder, you will be sorely disappointed and frustrated. Promotions and advancement simply aren't correlated to how well you are doing your job. I've seen far too many examples over the years of people sliding into positions of authority simply due to what appears on the surface as an all too cozy relationship with management. If you dare speak your mind or challenge the people in power, you're going to remain stuck exactly where you are until someone else takes charge. Such is life.

It isn't even that... I was handed the guidelines to promotions for researchers... its all there in cold detail... no matter what stripe of research its all more or less the same. Its still "non-competitive" but you have to be what's in the guideline book.... anything else is just wasted time and fluff.

 

[Patman]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Different agencies run things differently, but I suspect that for researchers pay is always less than outside. As you said, you have to balance that with the relative secureness of the job, but that could always change.

Where I worked, referreed publications were the primary thing that was looked at for promotions if you did not get into management. At some point they started figuring in how many other papers (external to the lab) referenced the papers that you wrote.

Not knowing what Patman means by development, I can't comment since what some call development others call research.

The guidelines make a hard distinction between what is development and what is research. The fact of the matter is that to move up you have to be externally validated by papers and talks and the like. Further moving up does also depend upon your stature and able to freely operate... but the jumps involved from level to level of the scoring mechanism are fairly high. However, when you are tasked to do internal consulting and other like-minded projects which do not lead to academic papers you are not able to improve with reference to the guidelines. A fair amount of the rubric also goes into "self-directed" research... but when you're being handed projects there isn't much you can self-direct even if I had an idea of what to do.

The problem is that its a one-size fits all system. I want to keep what I did last year off boards... but let's say this. The results had force of law. The results were delivered to an outside stakeholder within another cabinet department. What we did amounted to an obnoxious improvement. I co-developed the method... essentially half and half. I am the lead author on all technical documentation. I was lead programmer of the methodology. I became research lead when my main co-author left for a new position. All of this was accomplished within an incredibly narrow time window (usually this takes a few years of development). This came at a continuing and ongoing expense to my personal health. The results were reported in over 100 news outlets.

I have done what people way beyond my pay grade are unable. I possess tools essential for the continual development of methods at my agency. I don't say these things because I'm just whiny.... I have done these things. They should be creditable events. I use high level complicated methods which are beyond the abilities of 98% of the other "math stats" (most of them holding masters degrees or bachelors... I'm not a wunderkind... I'm just good at what I do... nevertheless, they can't do what I can) to fuse together data sources and model situations to provide estimates of much higher accuracy than we would otherwise provide.

---

So, essentially, Ralph is right. All they're looking is for peer-review and the ability to self-direct research that leads to peer review or "scientific understanding". None of the above counts. Especially with the budget being tightened. They can't give me a bonus for all of the above. Not permissible. They're trying, now, to temper my expectations saying things aren't going to go "as fast as I'd like". I wish they had tempered my expectations when I explicitly said I was doing this to establish my career and the multiple times that i said that this was going to pay for my (hypothetical) new car. I expected them to be on the level.

This one is going to take awhile to get over.

 

[JF_Gophers]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

Ugh, and I'm on Facebook.

 

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Rep Retirement Lodge #149 - Best adaptation of a movie title-and the lodgie goes

The guidelines make a hard distinction between what is development and what is research. The fact of the matter is that to move up you have to be externally validated by papers and talks and the like. Further moving up does also depend upon your stature and able to freely operate... but the jumps involved from level to level of the scoring mechanism are fairly high. However, when you are tasked to do internal consulting and other like-minded projects which do not lead to academic papers you are not able to improve with reference to the guidelines. A fair amount of the rubric also goes into "self-directed" research... but when you're being handed projects there isn't much you can self-direct even if I had an idea of what to do.

The problem is that its a one-size fits all system. I want to keep what I did last year off boards... but let's say this. The results had force of law. The results were delivered to an outside stakeholder within another cabinet department. What we did amounted to an obnoxious improvement. I co-developed the method... essentially half and half. I am the lead author on all technical documentation. I was lead programmer of the methodology. I became research lead when my main co-author left for a new position. All of this was accomplished within an incredibly narrow time window (usually this takes a few years of development). This came at a continuing and ongoing expense to my personal health. The results were reported in over 100 news outlets.

I have done what people way beyond my pay grade are unable. I possess tools essential for the continual development of methods at my agency. I don't say these things because I'm just whiny.... I have done these things. They should be creditable events. I use high level complicated methods which are beyond the abilities of 98% of the other "math stats" (most of them holding masters degrees or bachelors... I'm not a wunderkind... I'm just good at what I do... nevertheless, they can't do what I can) to fuse together data sources and model situations to provide estimates of much higher accuracy than we would otherwise provide.

---

So, essentially, Ralph is right. All they're looking is for peer-review and the ability to self-direct research that leads to peer review or "scientific understanding". None of the above counts. Especially with the budget being tightened. They can't give me a bonus for all of the above. Not permissible. They're trying, now, to temper my expectations saying things aren't going to go "as fast as I'd like". I wish they had tempered my expectations when I explicitly said I was doing this to establish my career and the multiple times that i said that this was going to pay for my (hypothetical) new car. I expected them to be on the level.

This one is going to take awhile to get over.

Just remember that YOU did what you had to, and its your employer that dropped the ball. There is no reason to let their ineptitude take away from the pride that you should feel for a job well done. Hopefully you are able to find a position somewhere where they appreciate your skillset enough to reward you for a job well done, instead of sticking you into some cookie-cutter bureaucracy. I imagine that all of the work you have done will go a long way in helping you find that better job that you're looking for.