In theory it's annotated canonical information. Sometimes the novel canon and the TV canon mush up, but there are nerds policing nerds to make sure that fanfiction doesn't take root.
Once again, its saying Harry isn't good at his job. Besides, are we supposed to believe in open space NOTHING ever happens because the crew of one ship is a sleep?
Harry is Night shift Captain Sometimes. Operation's is staffed in all three duty shifts always. Always is a much larger number than sometimes.
In Warhead, the Captain Kim episode, the entire bridge crew seemed to be him and some fantastically attractive blonde girl. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0922877/ The Night Shift is understaffed by Janeway or underthought out by Braga.
I'm curious,why did Janeway start letting Harry command the night shift? I wonder who else got to do the same job;it would be interesting to know if Braga and co. had actually thought up who commanded all the other shifts.
I googled a while back, I found three shifts... Night, Day and Early. It's possible early shift and the day shift is the same thing, but Janeway said that they couldn't run the ship with less than a hundred people, which one would assume means two shifts, so with 150 crew it's more than possible they had three Spartan shifts on Voyager. This is how I would imagine Night Shift works. There's a planet 5 hours at maximum speed, the day shift isn't on duty for another 7 hours, so lets go a little slower than maximum speed, get to the planet in 9 hours so that the day shift has got it's shit together by the time they have to make any decisions. ... Harry was given command of the ship in Futures End during a hairy tense battle situation. There was an episode were Harry told Tom to get some command experience and sign up for some night shift duty as acting Captain... But lets be clear about this, the first thing the acting captain of Night shift is supposed to do the second anything goes pear shaped is to wake up Chakotay or Tuvok. If things get really bad, those two try to wake up Janeway.
"operations manager" sounds like the most generic mid-management job in Starfleet. It only exists because Brent Spiner looked awful in blue, so they came up with a job so Data could do vaguely science-y things while wearing yellow.
Not leaving enough work for night shift is not a criticism of inefficiency. It's the dominatrix verbally punishing the (insert official term, which I realize I don't know.) Giving it a low rating is the joke. If anyone's the target here it's Seven for being unreasonable and the Doctor for being a stooge. As to operations? Kim scanned until Astrometrics went on line, opened hailing channels and I think rerouted power a lot. Seems important to me. Again, in context it seemed pretty clear that Kim wasn't a senior officer until after the Caretaker disaster. Janeway in Twisted expressed her pleasure at Kim's success in meeting his unexpected responsibilities so successful. Which implies some element of surprise after all. Harry wasn't going to get the girl because he was there to make Tom look sexier by contrast. When he did get the girl in The Disease she was the only alien that the Universal Translator gave an accent to in the entire twentieth fourth century. The failure in Timeless is a plot hole because Old Harry's plan would have come straight from the Star Fleet analysis of the original wreck. Which they are going to do because they'd like to have the drive working so they can use it. Old Harry's personal creative work was the on the spot calculation of a way to safely emerge. Which is in fact an impressive feat. Nightingale is actually an attack on network suits micromanaging (whether the writers meant to include Berman?) The story does absolutely depend on Janeway, Chakotay and Tuvok not bothering to check out the aliens' story about a medical mission, which is also incompetent. And it turns on Seven of Nine being a total master of human relations even while simultaneously showing all the tact of the Collective.
It seemed to me that whenever mommy Janeway scolded Kim, she would emphasize his lowly rank of Ensign in a condescending manner
The show always treated Janeway as Harry's mother-figure, and that was I think one example of it playing Harry as Janeway's adoptive son. "See you soon Harry" wasn't intended to freak out Kim but to taunt Janeway by threatening her offspring in revenge for Janeway taking the Queen's child. I always thought that they missed a trick by leaving out a de facto sibling rivalry between the two for Janeway's approval. But Kim wasn't a major character so it couldn't have been too important I suppose.
Sibling rivalry between Kim the surrogate son (by Tuvok?) and Seven the surrogate daughter (by Chakotay?). Seven was the surrogate daughter and they still slashed Janeway and Seven, so I suppose they could have slashed Kim and Seven too as well as doing sibling rivalry. But as I say, Kim wasn't even a major character, often cut out to the point we couldn't believe Janeway had any particular regard for Kim as a substitute son (or, even perhaps, dog.) Now that I think about really doing relationship drama on Voyager, they should have the nerve to show Torres as unhappily married to Paris. It would have been far more believable I think. The unlikelihood of a grown woman, much less one with a temper, putting up with Paris made the on screen relationship unbelievable, therefore of little interest. Since they were major characters, emotionally this left a great hole in the series later seasons. Not a popular opinion of course, but I still think a much more valid criticism of Voyager than Ron Moore ever made. Kim hating always seems like gagging at a gnat after swallowing a camel.
Garret Wang was paid somewhere between 20 and 35 grand per episode he was in, no matter how little or much he had to do. I don't think he cared how minor he was, if he still would have been paid the same to be a major character.