r/auscorp

Part vent, part what do I do now?

I recently took on a department lead role at a startup. Standard startup package... high expectations, a bit underpaid, and with a 5 day in-office mandate. It made sense for life logistics reasons (I can walk home over lunch to see my dog and basically don't need a car any more). Counting the public holiday and starting on a Tuesday, I am 13 working days in.

In that glorious time I have somehow managed to rack up two separate performance meetings and a formal written "letter of concern" today. Mind you, I’m deep inside my probation/notice period so if they wanted me gone, they could literally just wave me goodbye today with a week's gardeners leave. Why the drama?

The rap sheet against me:

• “Near-constant phone use.” An actual quote. I’ve checked my screen time during business hours and it barely registers. I pick up my phone maybe once every two hours to reply to a text, but apparently I’m being tracked (open office I guess).
• “Failure to submit a plan.” I have literally written a plan, presented it, and emailed/shared it with my manager and the leadership team. It is sitting right there in their share drives.
• “Being a distraction.” I’m new, I’m trying to build rapport, and I like to think I’m a friendly guy. Crucially, I’ve also shipped a ton of work in these 13 days, but apparently chatting while delivering results is a bridge too far.

I’m torn on whether it’s even worth responding to the letter. I could easily draft a professional, itemised list of everything I’ve delivered so far with some light pushback, but what’s the point beyond setting up a paper paper trail war? I’m so fresh here that a PIP isn’t even legally necessary.

Financially, I need the pay right now, so quitting on the spot isn't an option. Guess I’ll keep my head down, update the CV, and start interviewing elsewhere immediately.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? Do I bother formally replying to the letter or just quietly ride it out?

[supprimé]

Hi all, hope this is an ok question for the sub!

Without doxing my linkedin, I work for a business that contracts for defence in a fairly niche role. I started on a 12m contract after leaving the army to do some face to face work, handling personal engagement with defence personnel.

I have been very successful in the role and received stronger survey feedback than many/most of the other people in my role, even ones who are far more qualified and experienced than me. I THINK I've been responsible for drumming up more business, but it's very hard to prove that the extra work is traceable back to me.

I was planning on leaving the role in December to pursue some of my personal interests and travel. My boss and our CEO sat down with me about a month ago to ask me to stay on, and I said no thanks. However today they've just offered me $190,000 with a potential $30,000 bonus. This is basically doubling my salary and I've decided to cave and stay on for another year or two, because this is pretty close to life changing money for me.

Having talked to some friends, they've told me that I should treat this as an opening offer and ask for more. While I agree that I think I've probably been the reason we've been contracted for a lot more work in the last 12m, I just feel really awkward about asking for more. And since this is the first time I've ever really been able to negotiate, I'm not sure how much I should even ask for.

So I guess two questions. Is it common in corporate culture to come back with a counter offer, even when their first offer was this generous? And what would I even negotiate based off, it seems like asking for more could sour the whole thing and if I ask for extra after a single year in the role. I almost feel like the risk to the relationship for another $10,000 or whatever isn't worth it. This is so much money to me that I'm afraid of it being taken away.

Thanks all!

Update: I'll be taking the offer when I meet with the CEO this morning! Thanks all for the advice and perspective, something felt off about the idea of negotiating and I don't think it's the right time to do that.

And thanks to the dudes who guessed who I am and have kept it classy.

What is your workplaces view on bring kids to work during school holidays? So far nothing bad has happened but I’ve noticed it’s a distraction when they’re running around unsupervised or sometimes even when supervised.

It’s great the parents feel the location is safe enough for kids and I can imagine finding childcare is expensive but…

what’s the line between being accommodated and being unprofessional?

Genuine question for those in data, analytics, or tech-adjacent teams across Aussie enterprise/banks/consulting:

Why is it so common to see Team Leads and Engineering/Analytics Managers appointed who have zero technical background?
In my team, we constantly run into situations where:
-The lead can’t evaluate complexity, so estimates are completely disconnected from reality (either committing to impossible deadlines or panicking over simple fixes).
-Senior devs and analysts spend 40% of their week playing "translator" just to justify standard technical debt, ETL pipeline constraints or why a stakeholder's ad-hoc dashboard request is unsound.
-Career growth and technical mentorship basically don't exist because the lead doesn’t actually understand what good code or solid modelling looks like.

I get the classic corporate defence: "Managers manage people, ICs do the technical work," or "They’re there to manage stakeholder politics so you can build." But when a lead has zero grasp of the fundamentals, they can’t effectively defend the team or push back on absurd requests from non-technical business units.

Is this purely because corporate Australia prioritises smooth talkers over domain competence, or is there a genuine shortage of technical folks willing to step into management?

How do you manage this without burning out from doing half their job for them?

So I had an IBD flare up earlier this year and since it was a busy period at period at work I requested to WFH while I recover, which eventually led me to be put on a flexible work agreement until the end of the year.

Since then the WH&S person I checkin monthly with has been asking some pretty personal questions, such as - who am I seeing for this treatment, what medication I'm taking, how long until I'm fully recovered, whether this has happened in the past, what type of symptoms am I experiencing, what steps am I taking for management it etc.

I've already probably overshared too much with them but now I'm getting pretty sick of having to report back to them monthly when they're asking for kind of information.

Is this common or should I just tell then to fuck off? I get they're wanting to gauge whether I'm fit for work but why the fuck do you need to write down what medication I'm on? You're not equipped to handle that kind of sensitive data.

For context, I work in tech so performing all my duties remotely is 100% doable (in fact I don't even work in the same state as the rest of my team...) so I'm not sure why they're trying to make things so difficult.

For those who’ve managed interns before: what made the outstanding interns stand out from the rest? What were they like? What did they do/how did they behave during their internship that made you want to hire them? Also, what do interns sometimes do that actually works against them?