Peer Review
Quality is one of those perfectly sensible words which have since been adopted and brutalised by management. In this case, I’m ranting about the suffering quality (or to be more specific Quality) has come under, because it’s currently a subject at the forefront of my mind. When a guardian angel starts (which is rare, given our lifespan, and career prospects.) then a few processes are required to ensure that the newbie doesn’t ruin some poor innocents lives. This process, of ensuring someone inexperienced doesn’t fuck up, is called “Quality Continuation” and essentially means two things.
First, the newbie is given a mentor, whose job it is to get moaned at about all the stupid stuff we’ve all become numb to; and occasionally explain a process for something that is poorly explained in the official documentation, or wasn’t envisioned when the official documents were written. Given that official guidelines are updated on a centennial rolling scheme, this means that there are a lot of hidden processes and guidelines that the poor newbie hasn’t a chance of knowing.
Secondly the newbie’s work is peer-reviewed; which means basically a few other angels are given the job of watching everything they do, correcting all their mistakes, and writing lengthy explanations about all the corrections. This is so the newbie has a chance to finally understand what it is they’re supposed to do for a job. Peer review is fortunately shifted around the experienced staff until the newbie has stopped requiring constant hand-holding.
As you may have guessed I’m currently doing peer review for a newbie (newbie being a relative term, this guy’s got a couple of decades experience, but in this job things unfold pretty slowly.) which is a thankless task, as management never devote the amount of time to it as is required to do the job properly. So I’m doing one and a half jobs for the price of two. But it could always be worse; I could be mentoring the poor soul.