Your worst job / best job? 23 September 2022 at 4:16PM in Employment, jobseeking & training 37 replies 1.9K views

B0bbyEwing

Not in the sense of what was the job title (although you can share that if you wish) but what made your best job so good & what made your worst job so bad?

Bit of a cop out maybe but having only had the one (well, two if you count work experience) then it automatically fits both categories for me.

So what makes it good - 
good group of guys, generally. We do get some empty heads but overall they're a good fun bunch.
The banter. Which ties in with the group of guys. We've (I've) got in trouble for it before when office staff get wind of it because it's not their kind of banter & so they don't understand it. Ageing labourers so I'm sure you can imagine. Office banter from the times I've been in there seems to be on the lines of moving someone's pen 5mm from where it's usually kept. No thanks.
Job security. During covid I had zero concerns about job loss. During 2008 when the back end fell out of the world, I had zero concerns about losing our job. It would take a nuclear disaster for our place to go down.
The job itself is quite simple. Some will see this as a negative & I guess at times it can be but the job itself is not difficult.

What makes it bad -
the fact overtime is not an option. Not only that but you don't know when you're finished until you're finished. 5pm could be your time but equally it could get to 5pm & you may end up having to stay at zero notice until 6pm, 6:45pm. I think the latest I ever did was 7:45pm. 
Weekend work. Monday-Friday does me. Unfortunately we have to work weekends also.
The way the boss speaks to you. Well, when the boss gets going it's more screaming. Shouting all sorts, calling you all sorts. 
The way the management look down on the rest of the company. The constant b1tching between many of the departments towards other departments. 
The way that because their life is the company, which is fair enough, they own it, but they expect your life to be the company too. I don't mean just working hard, which is what anyone would want, but they seem to want your life to be the company. 
The way that it's not what you do, it's who you are. You could get 2 guys, both do the same thing. If one is flavour of the month but the other isn't, one is going to get both barrels & the other will be given a pass.

There's probably other things for each side but that'll do. 
What made you like/dislike your top/worst job?

Charlotte_Ca

The only fact that made some jobs bad was that there were not clear guidelines and they couldn't teach you the job properly. Even if people were not the best I could handle that as long as I knew how to do the job.

The fact that made some jobs good was when I had good colleagues, I was confident doing the job and salary was decent.

TELLIT01

My answer is very simple.  The last 7 years of my working life was spent at the Department for Work and Pensions after previously having worked only in the private sector.  If you take all the stories you have ever heard about incompetence and waste in the Civil Service and multiply by 10 you might get close to the reality.  "That's the way we've always done it" seems to be the mantra of anybody who has worked in the Civil Service their entire working life.

Charlotte_Ca

TELLIT01 said:

My answer is very simple.  The last 7 years of my working life was spent at the Department for Work and Pensions after previously having worked only in the private sector.  If you take all the stories you have ever heard about incompetence and waste in the Civil Service and multiply by 10 you might get close to the reality.  "That's the way we've always done it" seems to be the mantra of anybody who has worked in the Civil Service their entire working life.

What made you move to a civil service job? I remember I had a chat with a guy who was working at the job centre and he told me it's the job security. Another work coach told me that they get weeks off on school terms etc.

Having worked in both sectors do you prefer the private or public sector?

TELLIT01

It was only intended to be a short term job following redundancy, but at my age 58 at the time, it was proving impossible to find work in the sector I had been in for over 30 years.  It was simply to avoid being unemployed.  Money was poor, annual leave not great compared to where I'd previously worked.  Preference - private sector every day.  They are far more open to change.  Whilst I was at DWP one of my colleagues came up with a suggestion which would have reduced claim processing time considerably without increasing the risk of errors.  His team leader liked the idea, the department manager liked the idea.  It was put forward to the office manager who's response was basically as mentioned above "We've always done it that way".

breaking_free

Best job ever: delivering pizzas when I was studying for my degree.

I needed a job that fit in with my studies and wasn't intellectually demanding - fast food delivery was perfect.
Everybody was always happy to see me and I would be greeted at the door with big smiles and cries of, "The pizza guy - no wait - the pizza girl is here. Woohoo!" 

If I was ever late it was easy to placate a disgruntled customer with a voucher for a free pizza. Oh, and as a poor starving student, being allowed to eat my own weight in free pizza and garlic bread was a bonus. :-)

lincroft1710

TELLIT01 said:

My answer is very simple.  The last 7 years of my working life was spent at the Department for Work and Pensions after previously having worked only in the private sector.  If you take all the stories you have ever heard about incompetence and waste in the Civil Service and multiply by 10 you might get close to the reality.  "That's the way we've always done it" seems to be the mantra of anybody who has worked in the Civil Service their entire working life.

You must have been unlucky!


The department I worked in, everything changed. One form which was used in the tens of millions  to bechanged format and layout about 6 times, several others changed several times until they were computerised. The computer system for one aspect had such a radical change that the original was only accessible for viewing and incorrect records couldn't be amended even though this information was crucial to the ongoing work of the department. Staff appraisal forms radically changed 3 times.


Frequent new legislation saw not only aspects of the work but the work itself change completely.


The motto there seemed to be "We've done it this way for 3 years now , time for a change!"

TELLIT01

Maybe I was unlucky or maybe you were lucky, we'll never know.  

Just a couple of examples.

 

There was one section leader who could never keep a deputy.  The reason being that they dumped anything they didn't want to do on the deputy.  That meant almost literally taking on the section leader role because said person was incompetent.  However they had been in the Civil Service all their working life and simply either had their deputy changed on a regular basis, or moved to another section and the process began again.

A new system was being brought in and our site was to be used as the guinea pig for it.  We were told that the training package had been thoroughly tested and was fault free.  On the first training day the tutor handed out lists of all the errors in the training and what we would need to enter in various fields to progress through the training.  This ranged from entering letter O instead of zero, to having to mis-spell words in an answer.  Despite this we then progressed to the new system in a live environment, and it was riddled with bugs.  The question was asked as to why the system hadn't been tested on a dummy database, and the answer was they didn't have enough money in the development budget to create one.  This wonderful new system was the payment system for one of the major sickness benefits.

I'd been involved in IT development for most of my working life and seen some poor implementation.  Civil Service took that to a whole new level.

Diamandis

Worst job was working for RSPCA. Training was awful, no support on the job when working from home, 5 seconds between calls, not allowed to take a toilet break unless you ask a manager first and take that time out of your lunch time, being harassed if you're on a call too long (which is stressful when dealing with upsetting calls), terrible shifts and no flexibility. Were meant to have 20 minutes per week off the phone to have a meeting with manager which never happened because it was too busy and constantly being asked to take different types of calls we hadn't been trained at all for. I started with 14 people and only 1 stayed longer than 3 months, it's so frustrating because the call centre didn't give a hoot about the animals.

lincroft1710

TELLIT01 said:

Maybe I was unlucky or maybe you were lucky, we'll never know.  

Just a couple of examples.

 

There was one section leader who could never keep a deputy.  The reason being that they dumped anything they didn't want to do on the deputy.  That meant almost literally taking on the section leader role because said person was incompetent.  However they had been in the Civil Service all their working life and simply either had their deputy changed on a regular basis, or moved to another section and the process began again.

A new system was being brought in and our site was to be used as the guinea pig for it.  We were told that the training package had been thoroughly tested and was fault free.  On the first training day the tutor handed out lists of all the errors in the training and what we would need to enter in various fields to progress through the training.  This ranged from entering letter O instead of zero, to having to mis-spell words in an answer.  Despite this we then progressed to the new system in a live environment, and it was riddled with bugs.  The question was asked as to why the system hadn't been tested on a dummy database, and the answer was they didn't have enough money in the development budget to create one.  This wonderful new system was the payment system for one of the major sickness benefits.

I'd been involved in IT development for most of my working life and seen some poor implementation.  Civil Service took that to a whole new level.

I think the worst example of waste of both time and natural resources happened in the 1970s when it was decided to duplicate a ledger system of recording with a card system for each case. Note duplicate NOT replace, it was intended the cards would facilitate senior colleagues being able to access the information more easily.

For some reason the union got involved and told its members not to cooperate and not to use the cards. After several weeks agreement was reached and the union told its members it was OK to now use the cards.

A few years later the message came down from on high "No need to complete the cards anymore". A year or two after that a further message was received which enabled me to say to a junior colleague "You see the filing cabinets over there, they all contain cards. Please take all the cards out and put them in the confidential waste sacks"!

TELLIT01

Going back even further than the 70's to the mid 60's, my dad was in the RAF, in charge of admin for the station, and used to come home tearing his hair out about the attitude of the Civil Service staff working there.  He said many of the women used to literally sit there knitting in the afternoons but when asked to help out the standard reply  was "That isn't my job"  That was also the time when CS employees knew they were pretty well in a job for life.