in my 20+ year career, i've had plenty of experiences that have brought me to the conclusion that a self-organized model is the best way to go. good people management is so hard to do and so difficult to justify in an "orange"* company that is focused on bottom line dollar metrics instead of taking care of their people. those motivations lead to the promotion of people who are perceived to be able to "get the work done"** with a lesser eye toward people who could keep morale high by helping their people find fulfillment in the work.
this has led to me having several experiences with management in my career that were less than optimal. i thought i'd share some of these "manager horror stories" both for entertainment and hopefully, a lesson as to why the hierarchy model is simply broken.
just f'n do what i say
the year was 2006 and i had just started a new job with an online retail company. i was fresh off my 5 year failed business and basically took the first job i was offered without looking too well into the company. as i was ushered into my office, i had to squeeze past two engineers who were sharing the office with me and 2 other office mates (6 total). it was difficult to ever move in that room without bumping into anyone.i was shown my desk which had a computer with an installation of SUSE Enterprise Linux on it. this was going to be my workstation and i needed to get it up and running so i could start writing software. besides root, there was only one other account on there with a non-descript name. the user account had a password, so i couldn't log in and noone around me seemed to know the password to root. i tracked down my boss and asked him if he knew the root password. he said he did not, but then replied "can't you just hack it?"
i wondered if this was a test because i knew of no way to hack SUSE Enterprise Linux. sure, i could have booted up in a different OS and accessed the hardrive as a secondary disk to get access to the passwd file which i might be able to run a password cracker against, but i knew this particular version of linux defaulted to encrypting the hard drive which made it impossible to get any useful info off of it without the password. as i started to explain this dilemma to my boss, he stared back at me with a confused look on his face and then said "i'll just go find you the disks so you can reinstall."
i thanked him and went back to my desk to try to hack into something that was unhackable just so i would have something to do. an hour later, he shows up with clearly pirated copies of SUSE Enterprise Linux. with his task being complete, he left me to install the OS.
as i was in the middle of the OS installation, i heard a commotion somewhere on the floor. a very angry woman was screaming as loud as she could expressing her displeasure at the "f'n developers who never do what i f'n tell them. can't they just f'n do what their told? why is that so f'n hard?!"
the mood in the room got very tense. everyone stopped working on what they were working on, got real quiet, and started to fidget and contemplate the ruckus about them and their work. any of the slight joy that was left in that office was sucked right out. the lead engineer noticed the change as well and noticed that everyone was listening to this unprofessional display, so he jumped up and exited the room (i assume to go see if he could shut this angry woman up).
for my part, i had no idea who was screaming and i didn't really care. i knew that whatever the problem was, it had nothing to do with me and if someone was going to act unprofessionally, then i wasn't going to let it affect what i was doing. i simply went back to installing my OS. out of the corner of my eye, i could "sense" a co-worker, Robert, just staring at me. he clearly was waiting to say something to me about the unprofessional display. i decided to indulge him by making eye contact. he blurted out "don't worry about that, that's just holly doing what holly does."
"ok, thanks," i replied, "i won't worry about it... by the way, who's holly?"
"hehehehe," robert had a very deliberate and bizarre laugh. it was kind of a mix between muttley and yogi bear. "holly's your vice president. she's in charge of the whole department."
hrrm, i thought. what have i gotten myself into?
next time i'll tell more about holly and why i ended up leaving that place.
* "orange" is a reference in Reinventing Organizations that refers to the kind of organization that uses a hierarchical model of command and control to get an organization to drive toward positive metrics in contrast to a "teal" organization that uses a self-organization model to give purpose and meaning to the work that people are doing for the organization, largely by letting them make decisions, and in so doing will create success as a secondary item.
** when i say "perceived", that's really what it is. people who are interested in climbing ladders learn very quickly that perception is more important than reality. this leads to managers inflating both the need for the task to be done and the output of the task itself. i've always had a hard time when my boss, due to their good nature, would inflate the kind of effort that went into the work i had done. i seemed to usually have to tell my managers when i did something that truly felt noteworthy.
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