Originally Posted by: tsukiaa 
Originally Posted by: jsmith!@! 
I love the work I do. The workload is manageable, and the pay is high. Work/life balance is great.
OCFO is a bit political, and we have some bad behavior in my office. However, overall EPA as a whole is a good organization. They don’t want to seem to get on board offering full time telework like other agency. For these reasons, I’m looking to at least leave OCFO and possibly the agency.
What kind of bad behavior do the people have? I'm interested in working at EPA, but I've heard mixed things.
It’s mostly specific to my office, but we have a lot of very immature people. Most of the people in my office are rather mean, some downright sadistic. We have a few individuals in this place that run around indoctrinating people against others. I have people I’ve never even talked to that have started crap with me. When you deal with it and set them straight, they run and tell on you. It’s like being a *****ing daycare center. The managers don’t want to deal with it and don’t rein them in.
If you’re in management’s clique, you get away with stuff, and management’s clique doesn’t correlate to who is more talented or works hardest. And management yells at those not in the clique for the most minor slight if somebody brings it to their attention and forces them to deal with it.
We have one guy that got all giddy and was running around telling people and having fun with it when someone he didn’t like in our group got yelled at by a manager in a meeting. When the person had to go into the hospital at fiscal year end, he signed her card “nice going” for getting out of being at work. Honestly, that goes beyond immaturity. Someone that does something like that has something seriously wrong with them. But, he’s in the clique. So, nothing happens to him.
Management also covertly cherry picked people to take an all expense paid trip to Orlando to train for and sit for the CGFM exam. Exam fees were covered too. One of those persons failed the exam. When people got wind of it and complained, they brought the class to us, but we still had to pay the exam fees. So, you were damned if you didn’t go to the class because you were saying you didn’t care about your career. You were damned if you did go to the class because if you sat for and passed the test you were likely not going to get promoted anyway.
I also was the target of a couple of political witch hunts by one of our finance centers and our IT department for situations that were blown up and made into something they were not. Both were deflection tactics to cover up their own fallacies or otherwise get even.
Essentially, it’s a good agency, but you don’t want to work in OCFO if you are a finance person. I could go on and on and cite many other examples in much further detail. I’ve been trying to move to a budget analyst position outside of OCFO, but they have been limiting the areas of the EPA that they will hire from. I’ve been told by others outside of OCFO that they have had much better experiences.
What has kept me there so long is the high pay grade and management does not bother you as long as you stay quiet and hang your head low. What caused me to start looking is 1) the last stunt pulled with the other finance center mentioned two paragraphs above and how it was grossly mishandled, and 2) that the agency is hell bent on bringing us back into the office once COVID dies off even though I’m perfectly able to work from home. Full-time telework has certainly mitigated the bull crap; I certainly don’t want to go back to the office and be around those people. There are a lot of jobs posted on USAjobs right now that are offering full-time telework.
Edited by user Sunday, February 13, 2022 9:43:53 AM(UTC)
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