Labor Day is an occasion to recall abuses by management that created outrages that union organizers could exploit, until, like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm, union goons themselves became oppressors, and union advances, such as closed shops, featherbedding, and seniority, made American industry as dysfunctional as academe, and, in a union town, a man couldn't paint his own house. Unions advocating for government employees pushed absurdity to a stage that Newt Gingrich extols the efficiency of UPS against the US postal service, as if it has been conclusively demonstrated that managers in private enterprise are not bureaucrats. Newt has never worked anywhere but in government and academe. Give him five years at Microsoft and he might begin to understand that influence peddling and cronyism are as pervasive in private enterprise as in government. Too often, to get along, one has to go along with managers who will do anything to maintain the appearance of success and who deprecate work that impinges in any way on whatever they're currently hyping.
Ten years of intimidation in this environment, where benefits and rewards were conditional on neglect of everything else, and everybody else in my life, despite my successes, and despite my prayers at 3 AM or foul imprecations on an inane technocracy, culminated two years ago in a cordial, enigmatic message from a boss three levels above me: "I have something of importance to discuss with you." The woman who dispatched me had been working in absentia for months. She hadn't the slightest idea of what I did, but she had been appointed to a high-level job by another boss who needed unquestioning loyalty in her domain. The appointee was compelled to wash out ten percent. The edict from on high motivated the boss in my group to justify this purge in a system that he said he hated. I was elected to be axed along with an editor who had criticized him and couple of others. I knew it was coming and had already started packing my books and the trophy-plaque on my desk with my ship-it awards.
The project I worked on had been in a state of covert revision for two years. Anything I wrote was dangerous. The product team knew that customers who attempted to use the technology they had thus far produced, and that I had documented, could easily find out just how tenuous this blue-sky project was. It was changing so fast that anybody who knew how much of it worked didn't want it documented. The managers deprecated my work month after month. Finally, before an important release at a MIX conference in 2009, rather than release my sample code, the development manager told my boss it was so poor they couldn't use it. What he couldn't admit was that the only safe way to release his product in its current implementation was without documentation or with puffery of the sort that I couldn't write. The PMs dismissed a developer in similar fashion, and, a week after the release, they began re-engineering their technology, again. Customers, who were not unaware of this syndrome, threw the the CD in the trash as they left the conference, having previously invested money and developer time in such things. It was not the first treacherous project I had worked on, and this product eventually amounted to something, but, in progress to the goal, I got creamed. Five years earlier I had seen a similar threat soon enough to write numerous bugs so that a team trying to hide problems had to abort a release of their junk. My efforts saved the company embarrassment and money, but I was reorganized out of the department.
Recovery from these kinds of things is not impossible. New opportunities followed the brunt of it. I had enough skills that I could get back on the train that had thrown me off like a transient. I thrived for a year in a contract job, before I hit other limiting factors. The company had been bilked out of millions by opportunistic attorneys who won a class-action suit by contending that the company hired contractors to avoid sharing stock options and other benefits available to regular employees. On the new team, the project managers liked my code, unlike the team that had said I was inept. After six months, two levels of managers went to my boss with glowing reports and suggested that he put me back on as a regular employee, but the record was against me. I could only continue to work as a contractor. The one-year limit soon intervened, and I left for another contract with a competitor in our area. High technology seems to grow on trees around here. I worked for the duration of the contract but stayed in touch with the manager for whom I had worked during the previous year, who liked my work. Near the end of my stint at the competition he said that he had approval from his boss to hire me. Things were going along fine until HR told him that I had not demonstrated enough success in ten years previously to merit rehiring.
As you might expect, I have thought a lot about those ten years and how I subsisted on a single promotion. I assume HR used the too-long-in-level measure to disqualify me. Even though I'd had several good runs, the project on which I blew the whistle had hurt me more than the managers who bungled it. Even after many revisions, that project was not successful enough that it didn't require a a different approach. I worked on the new idea, a technology known by the acronym NSCUB (Next Generation Secure Computing Base). Thirty people hemmed and hawed for a couple of years before it foundered. While it churned, I was moved around from one manager and interim assignment to another. Eventually, I took the best opportunity I could find out of the division.
After moving to the new team I worked on a platform called WinFS. Have you heard of it? It's long gone, of course, but in that group I did gain some traction with a new manager. He was effective and well liked by developers. Unfortunately he was not astute in the politics of our department. A few of us noticed that he was taking risks. He apparently assumed that his skills and connections would protect him. When he was abruptly terminated, he found another job in the company, but those of us who had reported to him were without an advocate. It took the general manager in our department more than a year to replace this manager. Developers rejected everybody our boss attempted to hire simply because the new prospect was not the manager he had fired. In a system where support from a manager determines your place in the stack-ranking, it is not good for one's career to go through reviews without an advocate. Eventually, I was assigned to a new manager and got a good review. It was not enough to secure my qualifications before I hit the project that was lurching around in ways that made it expedient to cover mistakes at my expense.
Over time some of the people who do this kind of damage have to run from their record of mismanagement. I looked at the address book today and the org charts. Some of the worst managers are gone, but, the momentum of business favors those who understand influence, if little else. The value of an idea in the hierarchy, no matter how counterproductive, tends to be the sum of the clout of those who favor it. The walls of meeting rooms where decisions are made are opaque and sound proof. Information goes in, but what comes out is usually another reorganization, like the operation of a cult where poo-bahs continually move people around and cut them off from their peers, because rational discussion in the ranks is to be feared. The manger of the worst project I've seen has been promoted way out of proportion to results that were evident to to everybody when I tangled with him. His team was having trouble even creating an efficient installation package for their nonfunctional rights-management server. The extensibility features were inoperable. Opprobrium for the team was so pervasive that it helped me keep my job during the transitions to which I was banished.
In spite of all this, I can celebrate on Labor Day this year. I still have good references from managers who would hire me if the system didn't prevent them. I can still get contract work. Now I am working on great technology with people who don't have to cover up junk that doesn't work. They know their business, and they are civil about it. I sometimes think I'll ask some of the members of this team why things are different here, but it seems they are themselves the reason. In this group I have a life without the insane paranoia and everything else that goes with money and benefits controlled by politicized channels of power.
No system is good enough that the people in it don't have to be good, but, if I could decree changes to a system that has harmed me, I would change one thing. I think there should be a way to address grievances. Nobody in management wants to take time to follow up problems while deadlines are looming. Email to people who should be interested almost invariably goes into a black hole. HR departments seem an institutionalized early warning system for bad managers and lawsuits against the company. But, bad managers cost the company and stock-holders millions of dollars every year. They shouldn't be protected. There would be fewer lawsuits if grievances were investigated. Problems would surface and they could be rectified instead of getting buried in processes, closed meetings, or obfuscated by networks of managers who cower like thieves under open investigation. Exposing cheats could aid efficiency at every level. Ethical management is something like truth in advertising, debatable in theory but hard to quantify because data on its implementation is so rare. Has it ever been tried?
If things are going well for you, and this seems only the complaint of a member of what Jack Welch calls the clatches of simmering resentment in the lunch room, you might still want to pay attention the next time somebody in your organization is simmering, if not with resentment, with justifiable anger against a manager or co-worker. Damage comes around as much as it goes around. Any team that tolerates unethical conduct eventually harms quite a number of people. I've known groups of workers who fled en masse. If you have stock in the company, this is costing you money. In jobs that require intellect, people are not very productive or innovative when they work in rage and see the obliteration of perspectives that come only from some of those who are mauled by deceitful competition. If your conception of the universe includes ultimate justice, it will commend attention when somebody starts talking about injustice here and now. In the last analysis human solidarity may prove more satisfying than careerism. It worked for a while for the Teamsters. Lech Walesa made progress against the Communists.
No comments:
Post a Comment