Criticism and your profession

[docellis]

My boss thought I could create a 6 38 minute videos in 5 days.

[JL21]

My boss thought I could create a 6 38 minute videos in 5 days.

I guess it depends on the quality. Just strap a camera to a cat in the alley for 4 hours, split the footage 6 ways, and you're done with 4.8 days to spare.

[pioneer98]

I barely graze my toes in the water of design for my job, so I don't face what you face but here's what drives me crazy: people have no idea what's possible, what's not possible and what will take a lot of work and what won't.

The president of my company [expletive] jumped over the moon when I made a map of the US as a flat background in our company colors and raised the state of Nevada above it with a logo of the well known Public university he was meeting with overlaying Nevada and it took me 5 minutes. Dude thought it was a work of tedious art. Later, same guy doesn't know why it's taking so long for me to remove a bunch of dumb color graphics flattened right over the main subjects of a black and white photo from 1943 in jpeg form and gets impatient after like 30 minutes of painstaking work.

Yes, I can totally relate to this (engineer). This has a lot to do with my other rant about 7 months of work crammed into 7 weeks. I understand that sometimes deadlines can't move, and we need to be able to try to get things done quickly. But when a manager asks me to do something like this, I'm honest and tell them that I'm not sure if we'll get it done, but we'll do our best. They get upset because that isn't what they want to hear! They want us to pretend we are totally, 100% confident we'll meet the impossible deadline. Maybe the whole problem is me, and that I am just terrible at BSing people. I've done enough projects to know that unforeseen things always happen. Our schedules never allow for problems, though. Our schedules are a stretch even when things go perfectly.

[pioneer98]

To clarify something I was talking about: all of our projects require testing. We make a design, and then we test it thoroughly. Testing is designed to find problems. If problems are found we need to redesign and retest. Our schedules never allow any time after initial testing to do the redesign and retest, even though we find problems (however small) every time. You'd think we'd learn. I wish we could go through testing the first time and not find a single problem, but that isn't realistic, especially considering the other constraints we have.

[pioneer98]

nothing will beat ms paint

This 98-Year-Old Man Spent 13 Years Creating Remarkable Art in MS Paint

He does them 1 pixel at a time. A sample:

[SHOW]

To bring this back on-topic....If you are skilled and actually have TIME to do your work, you can create amazing things even with sub-par tools.

[Fat Strat]

My boss thought I could create a 6 38 minute videos in 5 days.

Oh yeah. I've been there. Especially back when you had to capture video.

[jim]

I care zero about what I do for a living, so criticizing me is wasting your breath. And actually my lack of caring about what I do means I come across as a "team player" and as one of my counterparts supplied on my recent performance appraisal "Cares about solving the problem and not winning the battle". That's not really true, I don't care about solving the problem either. But that's the way it comes across.

The less I care the better my performance appraisals are.

[docellis]

My boss thought I could create a 6 38 minute videos in 5 days.

Oh yeah. I've been there. Especially back when you had to capture video.

What do you use to edit? Feel free to PM answer if you don't want to derail the thread.

I used (Sony) Vegas Video and their DVD Architect program for a really long time, and Premiere here and there over the years. Well now I have the Adobe CC and it does not come with Encore....the media encoder has tons of options, but none are "burn to DVD" like Encore and Sony's DVD architect.

[pioneer98]

I care zero about what I do for a living, so criticizing me is wasting your breath. And actually my lack of caring about what I do means I come across as a "team player" and as one of my counterparts supplied on my recent performance appraisal "Cares about solving the problem and not winning the battle". That's not really true, I don't care about solving the problem either. But that's the way it comes across.

The less I care the better my performance appraisals are.

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[MrCrowesGarden]

Today, perfect example of ridiculous criticism.

We had a minor carbon monoxide scare at an apartment complex overnight. 30 people had to stand outside or sit in their cars for about two hours while fire crews and utilities ventilated (opened doors and windows) the apartment. No big flashing lights from fire trucks or anything like that. Honestly, it wasn't even all that big of a deal because it never even got below 40 last night. Of course, we sent our photographer out there to check it out and bring back video because that's what they want.

I get an email from my boss this morning saying we dropped the ball. The other two stations were live, should've sent our reporter out there live for two hours, our threshold for breaking news is extremely low, etc.

Except it doesn't merit that kind of coverage. We stuck with our initial story because it's got a broader impact to our target audience and viewers as a whole. I'm sorry, but 30 people who have to hang tight outside for a couple of hours doesn't mean that much to a metro area of about a half million people.

I also know that if we did send our reporter live, we would've been told that we need to rise above the herd mentality, don't just go out there and tell the same story five times (which this would've been), and think for ourselves.

It is the definition of a moving goal post, and every day jim's philosophy makes more and more sense-- and becomes easier and easier.