I went to work for a US based company (in the UK) a couple of years ago - as they were an organisation rather than a "real" company their checks and balances procedures were just plain silly (in my eyes anyway) a total of 7 interviews, meetings with directors who came out from the US just to interview me... etc.
They even carried out background checks to my first job in NZ before I had moved to the UK over 7 years ago!
To put this in perspective - I moved to the UK weeks before my 18th birthday to make sure I got my visa. They checked my performance with a company I was doing work placement with while I was 17.
I left them a year later as I couldn't handle the level of beaurocracy. Any expenses over 100 US dollars went to the states for approval and even our UK based directors had no autonomy.
On the other hand - under UK disclosure laws I found out more about my credit history than I ever knew (or wanted to know!)
But because promotions, pay scaling, accepted expenses, phones, travel and the like were all set up in advance I was in a better position there than I am right now -
I've been promoted to a whole new level, and don't have any guarentees of performance bonuses and the like.
Very depressing - think I need to find a new job
I've had to work at the beeb before, and their NOC requires that you have a "proper" network login - meaning that you're subject to their SMS rules regardless of you being an outside contractor or not... first day there with my lovely shiny laptop full of OS goodness... NT4 Server, IE5, Netscape and Opera... prompt comes up to tell me that I'm running an illegal operating system and Browser - and tries to downgrade me to IE 4! The horror, the horror!
Bearing in mind that we were demoing the latest build of our newsroom software to beeb execs (which did of course require them to upgrade to IE5!)
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I went to work for a US based company (in the UK) a couple of years ago - as they were an organisation rather than a "real" company their checks and balances procedures were just plain silly (in my eyes anyway) a total of 7 interviews, meetings with directors who came out from the US just to interview me... etc. They even carried out background checks to my first job in NZ before I had moved to the UK over 7 years ago! To put this in perspective - I moved to the UK weeks before my 18th birthday to make sure I got my visa. They checked my performance with a company I was doing work placement with while I was 17. I left them a year later as I couldn't handle the level of beaurocracy. Any expenses over 100 US dollars went to the states for approval and even our UK based directors had no autonomy. On the other hand - under UK disclosure laws I found out more about my credit history than I ever knew (or wanted to know!) But because promotions, pay scaling, accepted expenses, phones, travel and the like were all set up in advance I was in a better position there than I am right now - I've been promoted to a whole new level, and don't have any guarentees of performance bonuses and the like. Very depressing - think I need to find a new job
I've had to work at the beeb before, and their NOC requires that you have a "proper" network login - meaning that you're subject to their SMS rules regardless of you being an outside contractor or not... first day there with my lovely shiny laptop full of OS goodness... NT4 Server, IE5, Netscape and Opera... prompt comes up to tell me that I'm running an illegal operating system and Browser - and tries to downgrade me to IE 4! The horror, the horror! Bearing in mind that we were demoing the latest build of our newsroom software to beeb execs (which did of course require them to upgrade to IE5!)