You're forgetting the first part:



Sounds pretty cut and dried to me. A degree, lack thereof, or age should not instantly disqualify someone from a job. If you're under 35 with a degree, what should you do? Tell the college to revoke it?

If 8 out of 10 people under 35 with degrees are not working out, sounds more like whoever is doing the interviews really sucks at their job. Yes, saw that working for club fed, too: I saw someone hire an absolute bullshitter over far more qualified candidates who didn't last 6 months because they ended up causing major EEO problems.



You got that right; I wasn't going to stick around for 30 more years of wasting taxpayer dollars. I hated having to leave because there were a lot of good people -- young and old -- who were trying their damnedest to do the right thing. That, however, was not enough to clear my conscience and the moral problems I had with the things we were doing. A $500 award case is approved with no questions, but $50 worth of safety gear requires an interview with the director and a multipage justification as to why it's needed -- this was a regular occurrence and it galled on me regularly how little was being done to account for and properly steward taxpayer resources.

So, after spending my own money to get a certification that no one could tell me whether or not it was required, a huge discrimination issue that was ignored by my entire chain of command, including the local EEO and higher command EEO, I resigned.

Global.

It's the phony team concept, paired with the "F it, technically did my part" attitude. Team team team, and then the firm caters to individuals and enables non-team efforts while claiming team is key.

In business, I see it all the time. Missions statements all say the same thing:

Best people making best solutions using best tech materials processes and ethics to produce best product at minimum cost with best value and customer-driven solutions.

And it's #%&*$#. It means '"meets requirements well enough to ship and we'll honor warrantee for you". Real teamwork is out the window. It's all "did my thing, gotta go". Management isn't stupid. They know. Pride? It's left to individuals, and they get broken sooner or later, because it's always the same people taking personal responsibility to get it done, which means too much stress and no individual recognition, it's the 'team' that gets honored, when 3/4s of the 'team' that did bare minimum.

Sure there's exceptions in program management, absolutely. But their underlings tell a tale to the boss so the underlying issue isn't fixed. Then they wonder why good people quit and their quality goes down. I truly believe a lot of colleges are turning out diploma-equipped ignorants that feel they are owed something for nothing. Overheard from a 23 year old (right out of engineering school) mechanical engineer last week:

"I just want to get paid a lot". Yeah. Here's a towel. Dry that spot behind your ears first. You've done nothing. I want to hear about how you corrected your failures so I know you learned something. His first job. He can use Solidworks. Hooray! How come the parts don't fit? You don't know? No kidding you don't. You'd don't know enough yet, get to work! I'll train a chimp to play with Solidworks all day.

Here's an example Franze, that I think you can identify with:


Everything electrical I deal with has to be IPC 620 Class 3 compliant, with testing and documentation to back it up. I hold that IPC cert, plus 610, too. I know what I'm looking at and if it's Class 3 or not.

Yeah sure the individual parts are 620 Class 3 no problem. Then they get installed, and somebody cinches a Class 3 cable assembly to a support with a cable tie. Tightly. No strain relief now, bend radius gone to hell, wires in the bundle have to be pinched now too.

I bring it up, and I get blank stares as a reply. Professionalism should make them say "OK how do we fix that". It doesn't. They must be almost beaten about the head first. They hate the fact that it was suggested they did something wrong so I actually get reasons why it's OK to do what they did. I won't sign off.

462cid, those are some excellent posts and quite similar to the same stuff I'd seen. It might not have bothered me as much if I had been working for a private entity, but I expected those using taxpayer funds to be a little bit more careful in how they used them and in how they performed their work. Nonetheless, you are right in that management isn't stupid; they know exactly what is going on. So as long as it's not their butt in the crosshairs, they don't give a flying #%&*$#.

I'll add that I do sympathize with how ridiculous college has gotten these days, but as a millennial I (and I suspect many others in my generation) I was told that I had to go to college in order to get a good paying job and to top it off, I was expected to pay for it myself. We were told this little lie from the time we were born, so suddenly after going through all that bovine excrement, we get told that no, having a degree means jack and #%&*$# in the real world and what truly matters is how well you can lie your ass off without getting caught. It's a rough lesson to learn, especially for a lot of people who grew up isolated from reality.

Is it generational? I'd have to say yes. Millennials have been taught that they'll get a trophy just for trying, that failure is a bad thing and nothing good comes from it, that nothing good ever comes from taking responsibility, that there is no moral code. If we were taught that sometimes we will fail, mistakes will get made, and you don't get a trophy just for being there, topped off by being taught what matters is how we react to these things, then the situation today might be different. That's all a generalization by the way, from what I remember of the other kids growing up in the '90s.

Yes It can be very demoralizing! I have developed a "let the world take a swing at me, I control what I can control and document the rest" attitude. It helps a lot.

Also since my little cerebral-vascular accident (stroke) at 45- they say I'll recover 100%- I have a much more laid-back attitude about being alive. I'm still going to do things at work right, but it doesn't wrap me up like it used to. my life is mine, not theirs. My pride in what I do is high but I let myself know that other people's screw-ups are theirs not mine. I'll do what can be done, raise the flags etc., but if the guys in charge want it a way I don't like, I just don't put my name on it.

But make no mistake, plenty of old farts don't give a damn either.

Re: lying and not getting caught...I'm sorry to say I can't disagree much. The best engineer I worked for had no formal degree, he was self-taught. He had drive, well rounded knowledge, and he was the guy bringing the results and numbers to DARPA, too. And we had fun all the time working on hos projects. All the time. He was smart and a common-sense guy. His competence was infectious. he never lied about his education, and while he became an acting program manager, it was temporary. They hired a giuy with several diplomas for that. The good guy quit.

Another guy just like him had a doctorate in engineering though. I didn't know until the day he quit. He acted like a regular guy who happened to be an ME. Everything he worked on worked right. Easy to work on his programs.

And then there's another guy, a manager. His attitude is "my schedule is more important than anything else". He's afraid to let his boss see any setbacks. Treats his people like crap too. Needless.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the opinions and updates, I appreciate it.

I guess I still have it in me to "do the job right the first time". Anyway, they have decided to keep me on this project for only one more week, mostly because (of my assistance) the project has finished ahead of schedule. Despite this, I will complain to my recruiter because on paper, I'm supposed to
be given 2 weeks notice, not 1.

One of the things that as spun me out most of all with this, is one of my colleagues here in W.A. Obviously I won't name him. He is a government body, and was moved from a role of building management to basically now supporting I.T for these new offices. He's been doing the job
now for 3 months. No offense intended to him, but he didn't even know that you can boot a computer from LAN. He shocked me this week, because he's the same generation and age as me, because despite my findings, he said to me: "For us here, near enough is good enough".

Really? With untested applications in their build? With over 21 problems that I managed to identify and offer resolutions for? Unbelievable!

I've decided this week that I will draft an email to the Australian PM, because he used to be the minister for communications and infrastructure before he became PM. And the previous government, whenever anything went wrong, they always blamed external contractors, such as myself.

I just feel that as a citizen who pays a high % of tax, I deserve better from my government. PM Turnbull has promised the Australian people that he will "clean up the government". OK, he can start with things like this. Sure, I may be putting myself at risk of never getting a Federal Government
contract again in future, but if this is how they work, I wouldn't want that anyway.

I appreciate everybody's opinions, thanks guys. I thought I was losing my mind. Seems that I just take pride in my work.

Andrew.

I appreciate this thread as well. Thought I was also alone in a soup of insanity.

I couldn't take it any longer however ... even saw professional help ... was/is at a total lost.
Burn out? I don't know ... I think of it as "people out". Sounds terrible I know. But I enjoy working,
and taking pride in a good job done. How is that burn out?

A generational issue ... maybe more a survival technique for todays cost effective, just on time BS.
No problems, if you just say "$#§!" it. After all, the goal (job?) was to ship it out by so and so date.
Hey, its got four wheels. Good enough, ship it out. Job well done!

So, that's what I said. But in the other direction. Threw it all away. Counting the days now to when I start
burning off vacation and overtime ....

The best thing anyone can do for job security is to be as multi-skilled as possible and for those skills to be marketable and relevant to today's economy.


Millennials taking out several thousand dollars worth of loans so they can get a degree in "Gender Studies" or "Art History" will no doubt worry constantly about what their future job security will be.

This a thousand times! Garbage like gender studies is why the educational system is turning to crap.