>>14389
Be disabled, then they will hound you to see if you are still disabled instead.

It's not simple to live a life on Bennys like it used to be, when you had to write 2 things in your book and that would do for a fortnight.

Are DLA, JSA, HB etc claims managed by seperate counties? I want to explore moving around the country, settling here and there for a year or two, but my benefits were hard won and I don't really want to go through that again.

FYI I have no intention of using false ID - i realise how suspect the question sounds. Let it be said I'm simply trying to break from my sheltered life and experience more of what the UK has to offer.

>>14394
Surely you're one of the last holdouts on DLA and will be losing it soon anyway.

>>14395
Ehhh. PIP:DLA is still lingering at 27:13. Looks like the migration stalled with Covid with more people claiming disability overall.

>>14466

There's a majority of women in my department at the minute, but they're mostly older (50ish) so they don't seem to be as interested in putting each other down. Unless they all just gossip about me being a shit boss, maybe.

>>14481
Most times I've worked in a mainly female office it's been quite laid back. There's a lot of banal conversations about what they watched on telly or what they'll be eating that evening, but nothing bad. The only times it's been a paid has been the rare occasion there's some form of power struggle going on and a couple end up at each other's throats.

I've got an email for our work's Christmas party and it's dawned on me that almost everyone I actually like enough to spend an evening getting drunk with has left since our last one in 2019.

>>14520
For me, this is usually the sign to abandon a sinking ship. Even if the replacements are competent.

>>14521
A fair bit of that is because I've turned into a bit of a hermit over the past couple of years. Their replacements might be alright, but I've just not really got to know them.

>>14511
Someone like him as Labour leader would be amazing.

>>14513

lalala I don't like when reality doesn't match my ideology so I'll just pretend

>>14498
>Neither the decision to withdraw the stock nor the failure to deliver replacement stock has anything to do with the DfT.
Nonsense. It was within DfT's gift to allow them to keep running until the replacements were ready. The 455s on SWR have been refitted and will be running for anything up to a decade.

>455 diagrams are currently being filled by 377s.
... which takes them away from their own services. Lots of services being removed or curtailed from 8 to 4 cars. Which Southern couldn't do without DfT approval.

>>14497
Beeching envisioned a lot of those lightly-used services being replaced with buses. Obviously, that didn't end up happening.

FWIW, general consensus among industry types that want to improve transport is that a simple "reverse Beeching" probably isn't the best way to go in most cases. Lots of places are genuinely too small for a rail connection, and extra stops need to be factored into timetabling through services on a mixed-traffic line. A useful rule of thumb here has come from the Scottish Greens, who suggest that nowhere bigger than 5k should be without.

FWIW, London demonstrates a good case of integrated transport at work, where in the outer boroughs you have bus services that will take you to rail and tube stations. This is something that's lacking in the rest of the country outside of a town's main station having a bus interchange nearby.

If nobody wants to drop a thousand or so new homes near your village, then the very least it should expect is a bus to a nearby station on the line so you might have, say, a 5-10 minute bus connecting into a 10-15 minute train service, instead of an hour-long ride on the bus getting stuck in suburban traffic. Depending on the lay of the land locally, it might be your village that gets the station that people in adjacent villages on the line might travel in to.

>British postal workers, train station staff vote to strike

>British postal workers and train station staff have voted in favour of strike action, their trade unions said on Wednesday, as workers across the economy grapple with employers as surging inflation bites. The Unite union said around 2,400 managers across 1,000 Royal Mail (RMG.L) delivery offices had voted to strike in a dispute over job cuts, pay and working conditions, and said it would announce strike dates in the coming days.

>"Our members have had enough," Mike Eatwell, Unite national officer with responsibility for the Royal Mail postal group, said in a statement. "Senior management at Royal Mail has lost the support of their own managers and need to reflect carefully on their next steps. They need to come back to the negotiating table with a set of constructive proposals, otherwise strike action will go ahead causing chaos to letter and parcel deliveries across the UK." Another union representing staff at Royal Mail are also balloting their members for action.

>Further disruption on the railways is set to follow. The TSSA union said on Wednesday its members in train station roles at Avanti West Coast, which operates passenger services including from London Euston to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, had voted overwhelmingly for strike action. "The ballot result at Avanti is only the beginning. Our union is balloting members across almost another dozen train companies and Network Rail," TSSA General Secretary Manuel Cortes said. "If they had any sense they would come to the table and sort this out, so we have a fair settlement for workers."
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/british-postal-workers-train-station-staff-vote-strike-2022-06-29/

This is the perfect time to promise to send a package only for it to sit on a table for 2 weeks.

What's L&D? I went on a course once for work and that was very useful. However, I didn't do the exam at the end because everyone else had already failed or given up by that point, and also, it might not be L&D.

I went on a weekend course in sales management at my old job, and it was shite. The lad giving it was just barely out of uni and very noticeably lacked real-life experience. All your studied sales lingo is next to meaningless if your job experience so far has largely been inernships and some entry-level position at a hip new startup whose smartphone app is virtually unknown to people outside your bubble.

>>14447
>What's L&D?

Leadership & Development. Generally used to refer to management training, but it's been co-opted to just mean "the training bit of HR".

The only good course I have ever done, is Situational Leadership. Use it every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory

>>14447
>>14455
What the fuck. It's clearly learning and development.

>>14405

I have no idea how much traffic 4chan gets, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if activity there were monitored by security agencies. For one, even piddly little real life UK groups have been infiltrated by police, so the actual importance doesn't really seem to have much bearing on whether people are willing to sink time and money into surveillance. For two, 4chan has had a disproportionate cultural effect, to the extent that even my mam knows what a "meme" is in this bizarre nightmare world.

>>14405

You know how there are places in your city that the pigs know to patrol round more often because there's likely to be a lot of dodgy sorts hanging about there? 4chan is like that for the internet.

I don't think for a minute it's the hackers on steroids scum of den and villiainy it's always made out to be, but when there have been documented cases of high school shooters and chronic wanking lady-stabbers who posted on there and even hinted at their actions, the authorities are bound to keep tabs on it.

Although, if we're going to indulge our tinfoil hat gut feelings, I reckon it's more likely the spooks are the ones who egged those lads on. We know for a fact the CIA/FBI is batshit enough that it literally funds terrorists just so it can arrest them later, you think the US having their own troll farms to shit up /pol/ and influence the online alt-right zeitgeist is far fetched? Or do you think only Russia and China play that game?

I spend enough time on 4chan that I have noticed, several times, when large numbers of paid users start appearing. There are a few mentally ill posters, but there aren't enough to fully explain when lots of people suddenly support the Chinese government for no reason, or start repeating pro-Russia talking points in a tone that is just slightly insincere, somehow.

I just said you shouldn't look at /g/ because it's nothing but students and hobbyists, nobody there has an actual technology job, they're all insecure about this and that's why they actively discourage anyone from trying to learn or improve, and the only topics ever discussed are brand wars (no knowledge required), open-source obsessiveness (it's free stuff, exactly as a board of terminally unemployed students and NEETs would rely on), politics (it gets everywhere; it's the kudzu weed of discussion), and programming (a very popular hobby, especially among teenagers). Topics like domain registrars, virtualisation, VMware, Plesk vs cPanel, T568a vs T568b cabling, and database administration are all things that would only be discussed by people who have real jobs, and they are all curiously absent from /g/. I don't care if the people desperately insisting that they're really good with Python are glowies or not. It honestly doesn't matter.

>>14409
>everyone who disagrees with me on my contrarian anime forum is mentally ill or a paid shill, I can tell because of their tone
Come on, lad.

>>14410
That's not what he's saying lad.

Unionisation & decimation.

>>14365

>"Give yourself permission to relax."

The only appropriate response to that is a massive fart.

One hour wanking sessions every day.

>>14370
Unfortunately you've transformed your office into the Children of God cult.

Daily Two Minutes Hate with films of rival companies.

In your shoes I usually adopt a "fuck it" mindset. If you don't get it it's not a big loss.

>>14289


You might be right that I'm just not relishing failing at an interview, but honestly if I don't succeed it's really just going to be because other people have more experience, which is hardly something I'll feel bad about. Maybe I just want it more than I'm telling myself. Perhaps this is more of an /emo/ thread than a /job/ one.

>>14290

That's exactly what I expected to do. I have no idea why I started to panic when I actually got the interview confirmation.

I don't have much help to offer but whenever I've done internal interviews, it's always been twice as nerve wracking as an interview at a new place.

I had to have an interview with my two most immediate managers for a promotion last year and I was a wreck. Totally bollocksed it. It messed with my head too much going from the usual relatively informal relationship we have to pretending it was all super serious. Still got the job like, the interview was a formality at most, but still. The whole vibe was just too incredibly awkward.

Anyway best of luck m8.

>>14293

>It messed with my head too much going from the usual relatively informal relationship we have to pretending it was all super serious.

I think this may be it. I work, laugh and joke with these people, they're my peers in all but title, so it'll be fucking weird to have to explain to them why I'm good for a job, when they already know exactly who I am and what I can do.

Also, the most important tool in the interview arsenal is embellishing or lying about experiences on the job, which is much harder to do when the interviewers were there with you.

>>14295

Do it anyway. The more obviously stuff they know you can't have been doing the better.

>>14283
> "must have a CS degree from a good uni"

This would really get my panties in a bunch if I could still bring myself to care about that kind of peacocking. Sure, good education helps and there's no denying that, but particularly once you deal with people who've been 'round the block a few times it becomes increasingly irrelevant. Most of the folks I work with (myself included) have a university degree of some sort, though only maybe 3/4 have one in CS. That said, there are absolutely brilliant folks who have no "formal education" and learned by doing.

Categorically if someone insists a candidate has a university degree, and even more so if it needs to be from a particular institution, when said candidate has several years of industry experience can go sit on it and swivel.

>>14282
>>14284
As someone who did a CS BSc at an ex poly and a postgrad research degree at a "good" Russel group uni (where I was involved with some of the undergrad teaching) I'm not convinced that "good" unis are necessarily any better than lower tier unis when it comes to bachelor's degrees.

In my experience it was actually the opposite. The ex poly was more focused on good teaching than research and hired lecturers who were actually interested in teaching and often had plenty of real world experience outside of academia. The Russell group uni had a great reputation for research and as a result hired career researchers who weren't interested in teaching undergrads, and it showed.

>That said, there are absolutely brilliant folks who have no "formal education" and learned by doing.

Nearly all the best CS people I knew in academia were self-taught amateurs before uni who would have gone on to be those people if they hadn't decided to go to uni

>>14285
>In my experience it was actually the opposite. The ex poly was more focused on good teaching than research and hired lecturers who were actually interested in teaching and often had plenty of real world experience outside of academia. The Russell group uni had a great reputation for research and as a result hired career researchers who weren't interested in teaching undergrads, and it showed.

This is something I noticed from outside of CS. I'd say that even at postgraduate level my experience with a Russell Group university was staff focused on their own work more than the needs of their students which, let's best honest, is what you associate yourself with a Russell Group for. It certainly bears out in the teaching/research ratio expected between the two types of institutions and as a result the kind of staff they attract. I was studying law so my undergraduate had teachers who either worked part-time as solicitors or were former quangos, the result was something that felt much more hands on and probably in line with what the students wanted.

I'm not denying that what you do get with the more top-tier universities is opportunities, there were no career fairs and people coming down from an ivory tower to lecture at my former polytechnic and the library might've well have not existed outside of it's use for printing. Still, it did change my perspective on what a good school even is which like a workplace is more about the people who make it worth getting out of bed for.

>>14273

OP here. My last post regarding this tedious saga: they were nice enough to get back to me to say they'll "keep me in mind for future opportunities and would love to stay connected".

That they replied at all was a pleasant surprise, but time will tell if anything ever actually comes of it.

>>14286
>as a result the kind of staff they attract
I'm not so sure about that one. The academics at lesser universities would relish the opportunity to spend more time working on their own interests and less time teaching A-level standard material to an overburdened classroom. The problem is they can't afford to because they won't get funding for it since all that goes to the universities with a better infrastructure for research already in place.

It's a chicken and egg problem, but we definitely haven't reached an equilibrium where people are choosing to pursue jobs at a university with lower research expectations so they can focus on teaching -- at least not in the hard sciences. There are certainly academics who value teaching, but in my experience nobody seeks a job as a lecturer so that they can be a teacher.

>Is there a smarter strategy here?
Yes. Getting another offer first, but you know that already.

>>14217
That might be the most difficult question in the universe to answer. It's very individual. For me, it's all about what do I first think about when I wake up? Am I already gnashing my teeth about who I might deal with, and thinking strongly of a duvet day? Or am I getting up and at them?

I have considered this a lot recently, and have also reach my limit on what constitutes that balance. I quit my job (without having another one lined up) because I thought the balance was out - I'm quite sure I'll find something else. Time will tell - if I'm queueing up at the foodbank in two months time, I was wrong.

It really depends on what you want. My mum works two days a week, and it pays her bills and has enough left over for the things she enjoys, and enough of a savings account to retire whenever she feels like it. On the other hand, I have a pilot friend who works as much as he's legally allowed, on about 100 grand a year, but because he lives in a giant house, has two posh cars, and so on, he's actually struggling for cash sometimes - and if he lost his job he'd be fucked. If my mum lost hers, she'd basically not notice.

>>14219

>Is there anything wrong with just being comfortable?

Nothing at all, in fact I think knowing when you are is a very valuable lesson in life.

A great deal of people simply don't know when to step off the hedonic treadmill, and that's what causes them their greatest misery in life. I'm reaching the age that I see a lot of younger colleagues pass through my place of work, and it always gives me this weird mixture of amusement and resentment hearing them say things like "Oh yeah I mean I'm not planning on being here forever, I can't imagine working a place like THIS all my life". It occurs to me that they've not yet been through whatever it is that teaches you that lesson, and that it's going to sting when they realise they are going to end up working somewhere very much like this all their life; because ultimately, most jobs are a lot of the same old shit.

Finding somewhere you've got the right balance of elements to remain happy is vitally important, and sometimes that means making less money. One day you realise there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it just goes on and on and on.

The question doesn't work because the two things aren't linear. I have a 'cool' career and as a result I work my arse off and get relatively shit pay for it.

What I've instead found is that as you rise the ranks into management you're increasingly not doing [subject] but back end corporate decision making and reporting. The kind of things that you really don't want to do but have to. That's more work than doing the things you're moderately interested in.

>>14224
I'm the opposite yet similar. I have a cool "career", but mostly sit on my arse yet get paid significantly more than the SA required amount. I'm not management and really don't want to be because, as you say, you stop doing the job and increasingly start having to do glorified paperwork. (Management should be a transparent shit umbrella, so you see the shit but don't have to deal with it.) I didn't "rise into management", I instead rose the "do the job" side of things, though the two get a little fuzzy at this stage. I'd rather go back to previous work[1], but the money is addictive and it fools me into thinking I'd be a fool to quit.

My opinion for >>14217, it's a balance. Do you have a family, do you have a mortgage, do you have other obligations or aspirations? Have you planned for your retirement financially? Sometimes sacrfices have to be made and needs must, and alternatives matter. If you could live your life and retire happy (this is not a given even if you own your property, c.f. fuel poorness in current pensioners).

So the question of balance is one up to you, with a whole lot of variables attached. And there is no right or wrong answer.

1) I used to work for a family company where I could see the daily take-in. They paid me what they could, I biked to work... I couldn't afford shit. Bit different now.

>>14049

Teaching is definitely a possbility. With an ever-increasing gap on his CV, OP will struggle to land a private-sector job worthy of his formal education, but all is not lost if he's still in his mid-20s.

In the mean time, I would go on the lookout for any job at all that gets you out of the house every day and gets you at least a few hundred quid a month. Two years is a long time to not be doing much of anything. It's not just two years of non-existing job experience, but possible employers will also be skeptical if you can just hit the ground running and get back into an everyday work routine from one day to the next.

There are jobs that can ease you back into a daily routine. You could do part-time work delivering food, or some low-level customer phone support. You don't have to work in a warehouse or supermarket.

There's a whole world of civil service jobs out there with an application process designed to cut out connections. If I remember right sifters and interviewers don't actually see your job history either because they certainly hired me with a year gap. Apply for HEO and at a push SEO unless you have management experience. Pay is shit but you can get a nice/work life balance in a very secure job that looks good on your CV if you ever want to escape, plus you're not selling rubbish to people all day.

If anything the problem we have is that not enough people apply and of those they seem unable to provide answers to the competencies so posts just go unfilled. I don't think it would be wrong if you asked for advice on competencies if you need it. Saged ticked because I don't know if I should be recruiting arse-pissers.

Here's a BBC News link about finding a job:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53685650

My personal favourite part, and by favourite I mean I am enormously angry, is when they ask the recruitment consultant, the woman whose job it is to find you a job, the woman who works for the company that actively stands in the way of you finding a job on any job website, for tips on how to get a job, and she says:
>Corinne Mills suggests drawing on your personal network. Friends, family and acquaintances will collectively know hundreds of people, many of whom will be hiring.
So in other words, nepotism. These companies have fucked the job market so that you need to go to them, and when you go to them, they just say "hope you have a relative who can hire you because I ain't doing shit." Recruitment companies are like landlords; parasites who enrich themselves by making society worse. I despise them.

>>14179
It's much cheaper to have a staff referral scheme than to pay 15-25% of the starting salary to a recruiter.

>>14056
That doesn't explain how I got my first civil service job. My mate helped me fill out the applications. A few days later, I got a call from him saying he couldn't remember what Uni I went to. I told him, and later that day I was invited to an interview.

Reading your post now - I think he might have told his sifter mate to pick out the application that had my Uni on it.

>>14169
I'm not him, but I think you're asking two questions there. Could something be done to tax the elites in a way they can't get out of? Sure; of course it could. Will they allow such a thing to happen? Hahaha, lol, and lmao, in that order.

>>14171

I'm not so sure, I think we are going to start seeing a backlash over the nest few years as governments realise their committent to free market liberalism has let individuals and corporations become definitively more powerful than them.

For now the politicians are happy to take their bribes and back room deals, but when it really starts to threaten national interests or security concerns (and therefore, the political establishment's grip on power) I think the pendulum might start swinging back the other way, with governments trying to re-assert authority instead of being pushed aside.

>>14172
>I think we are going to start seeing a backlash over the nest few years as governments realise their committent to free market liberalism has let individuals and corporations become definitively more powerful than them.
I get the feeling that some won't realise that they've been feeding the crocodile and will happily continue to do it.

>>14172
I think that's already starting to happen. But I suspect it might already be too late. If nobody in the government showed up to work one day, I doubt most people would notice. If Google or Facebook went down for 24 hours, people would be kicking off within the first ten minutes. And if the people had to choose whose side they were on, I can't be certain that more than 50% of people would side with politicians.

Anyway, while a tax on net worth probably wouldn't go anywhere, negative interest rates are very nearly the same thing and they've been proposed a few times.

>>14168

If you're still around, software lad, I stuck a temporary email address at the bottom of this post. I was hoping to ask you how you came about finding this niche and if anything similar might apply in my field off .gs.

Not meaning to e-stalk or take up your time, so no worries if you'd rather not, I just thought I'd give it one bump in /*/ and then leave it.

>>14124
ha, no. I'm not the phantom echoer, that's the two muppets in adjacent cubicles in another building (continent). My audio is peerless.
I suspect the 4 foot separation between speakers and mic helps, as does the carefully arranged anechoic arrangement of crap filling my office.
I have no doubt that Nigel is a poorly endowed prick though.

>>14125

Either you're causing an echo, or you're causing everyone's audio to be really choppy because of the echo cancellation cutting in and out.

Just buy some headphones, Nige.

>>14126
I work in a team which includes several engineers who have spent years fighting echo cancellation problems in conferencing systems. If my mic was pissing them off, I would hear about it instantly.
Teams may be wretched in many ways, but on the machines we use, it does echo and background noise cancellation tolerably. That said, my Thinkpad is about to be refreshed by something from Dell, so I imagine it'll all go to crap and I'll have to go back to headsets.

>>14126
Also, I live on mute, as I'm not a cunt and I often have nothing to say.

>>14120
>>14121

Thanks for the tips.

What I do is when I'm slacking off at work I go and waste time on the internet. I'm guilty of posting here now that I work from home but in the beforetime I would browse industry websites and various philosophical think pieces about life that I could get away with at work.

I don't see why FT would give you this, do they have a section on it?

My work is very weird, in that it seems to be being run with the explicit aim of making sure nobody ever has to do any work. I come here to complain about the twats who do nothing quite often, but whenever I'm busy, this seems to be a great affront to the corporate philosophy, like I'm not supposed to be doing anything either. Anyway, I have a lot of free time when I'm sitting at a desk doing IT support, and once I've read all the worthwhile stories on the BBC website, I will then migrate to theregister.com, which has news from the IT world. And that's all I really do, industry-wise. They don't want me going to trade shows and things, because then I wouldn't be at work, playing the glorified receptionist and surreptitiously looking at britfa.gs on my phone.

There are probably people on Twitter you could follow who would keep you abreast of NHS developments, but if you're a brain surgeon or something, I think you just have to read real research and you'll know better than me where they keep that stuff.

If there's some kind of professional registration for your workplace, they'll usually have newsletters and what have you. the IBMS send out a magazine every month to registered scientists.

Also your boss probably gets a shitload of junk-mail magazines that are intended to flog new equipment, but they do have useful things in sometimes, so ask him to pass them on to you instead of putting them straight in the bin.

But overall I don't think you need to bother unless you've got designs on being some kind of top manager exec type who makes decisions and all that. Personally I couldn't give a fuck, I just want to get paid.