Why the bitterness?
- sucking up to their own managers
- reacting to problems instead of anticipating them
- passing their days outside smoking cigarettes, which leaves them conveniently away from their ringing phones and swamped voicemailboxes.
Once upon a time there was a company with a vision...
How many stories start like that? A company is started by a founder with a vision. The company gets a little sidetracked, they lose sight of what they do best, of what their assets are, and they begin to lose customers and money.
Then, the founder gets replaced with a bottom-line guy. He drives a Porsche and wears his hair slicked back. He is going to save the company. The layoffs begin, but we all know they are necessary to save the company.
Amid the layoffs, vice-presidents are leaving left and right. Interesting, eh? Not to us workers -- we think they're the ones who got us in this mess, they ought to go.
But the next thing you know, the corporate culture has fallen by the wayside.
Digital used to be a company where the internal motto was "Do The Right Thing." There were many anecdotes in the company folklore of enterprising employees taking the initiative to satisfy the customer, to go the extra mile, and to apologize for it later.
Now, people who "do the right thing" are penalized. Visionaries are ridiculed and anyone with half a brain and any self-esteem has left for a job where the actions of management match the communicated vision.
I can't speak for the entire company, but digital's Atlanta Customer Support Center is home to workers and managers descending into the corporate toilet. Some people are going four and ahalf years without raises, while others are getting promotions and raises. Managers have 70+ direct reports and are too swamped (or too incompetent) to actually manage, so they spend their time:
I was hired into digital as a college student in 1985. I worked on DEC GKS, a 2D industry standard graphics package. We had the best, most complete and most robust packge among our competitors, mostly because we were encouraged by our management to do the right thing.
Our customers loved us. At the time, digital had well-trained customer support people in the event there was a problem with the software. Among our customers was a company writing missle detection software (remember, the cold war was raging) and a company writing air-traffic control software.
We, the engineering staff, shipped an improperly tested version of the software that contained a type of bug we call a "show stopper." In some cases, if you were running our software for extended periods of time, the software would consume memory endlessly until there was no more memory left. The program would begin to run more and more slowly until it finally terminated ungracefully in the middle of your work.
If you were watching an air traffic control screen, monitoring a sky full of planes, that meant your screen would suddenly go blank and display an error message, usually something helpful like "Access Violation" or "Segmentation Fault (core dumped)." Or, if you were the night watchperson at a missle silo, watching the progression of missles coming over the horizon from the Soviet Union, your screen would go blank and you'd get the same helpful message.
Upon examining the code, we found several places where a memory leak of this type could happen, and we determined that finding and fixing them all would take some time and effort.
Our manager, one of the new breed, told us that we couldn't miss our window of opportunity for this maintenance release, and we were told not to fix those bugs but to get this release out the door and fix those bugs "later."
What happened to "do the right thing?" I began losing sleep to nightmares of panicked air traffic controllers and catastrophic planes crashes. So, after registering my displeasure with that decision and having my concerns fall on deaf ears, I transferred immediately to another group so I wouldn't be liable when the disaster happened. Thus began my disillusionment and started the bitterness.
Most recently, at the Atlanta CSC, we went through a management re-organization straight out of a Dilbert comic. Upper management decided to completely restructure the business: "business managers" would manage the business, and "people managers" would manage the people. Of course, neither manager would attend our staff meetings, leaving us to complain about issues without having the means to do anything about them.
With the new structure, there would be one less manager than they were currently employing---when the music stopped, someone wasn't going to have a chair (or an office, for that matter). So all of the managers had to re-apply and re-interview for their jobs. When the music stopped, guess who lost her job? The only black woman manager. Go figure.
Should I go on? I could go on...
(To be continued ...)