I love these stories. I have a few as well. In the end I know we're all just doing our job, but I've been tempted at times to say to my manager: "I will save the company $10k/month tomorrow if you give me a cut of the pie."
It drives ya nuts to read a story where some guy on the shop floor saves his employer ten million dollars and to reward him they give him a 20% off coupon for Home Depot.
This sounds nice in theory, but would incentivize people to introduce unnecessarily expensive things initially and optimize them later to claim some of the savings. We would like to think that nobody would do something like that, but the sad reality is that there are plenty, especially as the potential reward goes up high enough.
> It drives ya nuts to read a story where some guy on the shop floor saves his employer ten million dollars and to reward him they give him a 20% off coupon for Home Depot.
It’s your job as an employee, it’s why you get paid in the first place
Is it? Or is an employee's job to just do the work they're asked to do?
"It depends" is, of course, the common answer, but in most places I've worked, "please help find operational optimizations that can have a positive impact for the team, department or organization" has certainly never been an explicit ask.
Ask team mates to change something to help on a project may fall under the same category, but usually the effect isn't felt beyond a project.
My default mode when coming in to jobs is to try to get a 'full company' view, because I want to know how things work and how they might be made better. That approach is usually not met with much enthusiasm, and usually more with "that's not your job, you don't need to know that", etc.
I took a daily import routine that was taking 25+ hours (meaning we couldn't show 'daily info' because it was out of date before finishing import) and got it down to 30 minutes. This was after having to fight/argue to see the data, and being told for a couple weeks "it can't be sped up, we'll have to buy faster hardware" ($8-$10k min, but they weren't looking at $15-20k IIRC). I spent a few hours over a weekend and got it down to 30 minutes, and saved the company minimum $8k. But I had to fight/argue to even do that ("that's not your job", "Charles is taking care of that", "the client will just have to deal with more delays while we upgrade", etc).
Uh, no. Have you ever been employed? Your job is what is laid out in your contract, period. You are paid to do that specific set of tasks and nothing else. "Other duties as required" be damned.
Fixing the business is very explicitly not your job, and is absolutely not what you're paid for. Any value you create for the business outside of those bounds is at your own cost and you absolutely will not be compensated unless the business is so small you don't have six layers of management trying to extract any kind of promotion.
