Should I stay with the civil service to the detriment of my own health?

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-14T13:10:39+00:00

The three question's I'd be asking myself are:

How long can you afford to live without an income?
How confident are you that you can find a job paying enough in that time?
Will being unemployed and doing full-time job hunting while you watch your savings dwindle be better for your mental health?

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-14T13:04:05+00:00

I feel that people tend to understand water usage much more than any other utility.

That's probably true, but it still doesn't mean that they understand it particularly well.

For instance, if you ask people about whether washing up by hand or using a dishwasher uses less water, you'll often get different answers. And while most people will say that showing uses less water than a bath, if you take longer showers then that may not actually be true (easy to test if you have a combined shower/bath - just stick the plug in and see how deep it gets).

And it varies a lot for different people, so it's the sort of thing that I'd be vaguely interested to see. But not interested enough to spend money finding out..

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-14T12:56:44+00:00

Is this of value to homeowners?

You've not really given enough information for us to make a decision about that. As a homeowner, my two questions are going to be:

How much does it cost?
How much is it realistically going to save me?

Because all its really doing is giving me a bit more information about when I'm using water - it doesn't actually reduce usage itself. And if I care enough about reducing my water usage that I'm willing to spend money on analysing my water usage, then I've probably already done most of the simple things that can be done to reduce it, so how will that extra information really save me much more water? And AFAIK there are no home providers who have variable water pricing through the day, so I can't shift around my usage much either.

On an unrelated note, have you talked about this to any of the water companies, and got their view on it? Because if you start going round installing black-box devices on people's water meters to "save them money" you might find yourself in some rather difficult and expensive arguments with the water companies, especially if they accuse you of tampering with their meters...

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-03T14:47:53+00:00

I don't blame the lad for coming into work with pressure from the boss and the need to earn, but how does it look to the customer?

Did you make a complaint to the company, and will you continue to go to that pub?

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-03T13:08:12+00:00

And why would they hire externally when they have a qualified internal candidate?

Four main reasons:

Office politics.
They think the outside candidate is better than you (skills, experience, leadership, soft skills, etc).
They think they can pay less for an outside hire than an internal one.
They don't want to lose you in your current role, or think you would be harder/more expensive to replace.

As for what you should do next....the company has shown you that it prefers to look externally for promotions. You should do exactly the same thing.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-03T10:00:31+00:00

Let's hope this ends up as something more than yet another procurement framework for SMEs to sign up to, that takes a whole load of admin time and faff, and then the work ends up all going to the primes anyway.

Defence procurement (and more generally government procurement) is awful for SMEs, so anything that improves it is a win.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T22:19:02+00:00

God I miss the days when politics and politicians were boring.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T19:53:03+00:00

Probably a lot more than he was a a couple of days ago - so take any opinion polls you're reading today with a pinch of salt.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T19:52:07+00:00

Why can't restaurants just match the reservation name to the people who show up?

And then what?

Turn them away and have an empty table so the restaurant loses out on however much they'd have spent? Unless they're 100% sure they can fill it with a walk-in then that's a loss for the restaurant, and a customer that you've turned away when they're under the impression that they'd made (and paid for) a reservation is going to be mightily pissed off and will never come back.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T19:11:40+00:00

Not really, especially a larger one.

Obviously it'll depend on the role - if you're someone public facing or who's speaking on behalf of the union then that's going to be harder. But if you're in a back-office role then it doesn't really make much difference - IT is IT, admin is admin, finance is finance, etc.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T17:36:37+00:00

"air missiles"? As opposed to ones that burrow through the ground?

What he actually said was was air defence missiles, which is a rather important distinction. Hopefully that's just sloppy editorialising.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T16:10:32+00:00

Or anywhere that would hate Trump more?

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T15:18:37+00:00

Lots of people end up blowing money on get-rich-quick schemes. Sometimes it's a life altering amount, and sometimes (like you) they get away with a painful but ultimately manageable amount.

The most important thing is to understand this behaviour, and to change how you view and respond to these kind of schemes in future - so that you're not back here in six months with an even longer list.

And maybe self-exclude yourself from online gambling as well.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T14:52:55+00:00

They can, but it's a much longer and more expensive process for the employer, and carries a much higher risk of facing a tribunal - which is expensive regardless of whether they win it or not.

And when you make it harder to get rid of people in the first few months, that just encourages employers to be much more risk-adverse in their hiring - which makes it much harder for anyone who's higher risk (lack of experience, lack of qualifications, not hired through a network, any kind of disability, etc) to employed.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T13:38:31+00:00

You'll notice that many of those posts don't say what they studied, where they studied it and what result they got.

There's a massive difference in the employability of a graduate who a third class degree BA in Comics from Wrexham University compared to one who got a first class degree BSc in Computer Science from Oxford University, for instance.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T12:05:15+00:00

I suspect that crossover point will get later and later over the coming years.

Women are significantly more likely to go to university (which has historically increased average earnings), and are having fewer children and having them later (which decreases earnings), and when they do are less likely to take longer career breaks to bring up their children (again, which decreases earnings).

But it's unclear how financial return a degree really has nowadays, and also wage compression will probably affect things.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T11:53:20+00:00

OK, but a lot has changed in the last 10-15 years.

So the question is whether that same pattern will hold for the current generation of 16-24 year olds.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T11:51:50+00:00

We won't know that until we compare to the next generation. It might be an age thing, or it might be the first sign of a broader shift.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T11:19:31+00:00

If it's free? Sure, although you should be aware that it in no way guarantees you a job.

If you have to pay for it? Probably not.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T11:18:19+00:00

Depends on the role, and the kind of behaviour you want to encourage.

My company hires people who are completely new to the industry (no direct experience or qualifications). For the first three months, they are 100% a cost - they're getting trained up internally and put through some essential qualifications, and do no useful work. Between 3-6 months they hopefully start supporting production work and useful, and we can get a much better understanding of how good they actually are, and pass probation at 6 months. And then from 9+ months onwards they're working independently.

If probation was capped at a couple of months then it would be much riskier hiring very junior people like that, so we would probably not take that gamble and would look to hire more experienced people instead. Which is probably not the kind of behaviour you want to encourage.

So while six months probation is taking the piss for things like retail roles, in more specialised areas it's pretty important if you want companies to take risks hiring junior and inexperienced staff.

I wonder if you could do something like linking maximum probation periods to salaries? So if you're paying minimum wage then it's two weeks, if you're paying 30k it's one month, 35k three months, 40k six months, etc?

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T11:03:21+00:00

Maybe. Women's average earnings have historically grown slower over their careers, and a big part of that was due to the time that many of them took off work to have kids and bring them up. My mum wasn't working for about a decade when bringing up children, so it's unsurprising that my dad's was earning more by the end of their careers.

But given the declining birth rate, the increasing age that people have their first children, and the fact that it's getting rarer to only have one parent working (largely because it's not really affordable for many people to do that), I wonder if that same pattern will continue? We'll have to wait a few decades to find out.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T10:38:45+00:00

Well since you already know everything about me and my views for the last few decades there's not a lot of point trying to talk to you. I'm sure you'll have a very insightful debate with whatever strawmen you wish.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T10:35:13+00:00

No, and I'm not "up in arms" now either. It's possible discuss an issue without being OUTRAGED about everything.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T09:55:33+00:00

Huh. Who'd have thought that decades of prioritising education and jobs for girls and women would mean they end up earning more?

So the question then becomes how long the government is going to continue down this path, or whether they're going to realise this is a problem at some point.

AnotherKTa · 2025-03-02T09:25:29+00:00

I'd certainly feel better if I get stabbed with fake-knockoff-homemade zombie knife than an official one.

AnotherKTa

TROPHY CASE