Maybe you've not gotten the truly bad apples, or have enough process in place to mitigate.
I've been in environments with people who are breaking things at a rate that causes a day of their work to cause more than a day of work for others.
Fighting with management for months and then shunting them off to their own 'strategic branch' for 6 months was the only way to protect the team until they were fired.
I think that explains some weird behavior I witnessed at several places years ago.
We were doing fine, but not awesome, and then management started taking big risks and we flamed out. Very frustrating to spend time and effort on something you know is killing the company.
That is a strange, dysfunctional work culture. Consider this a strong indicator that management has no idea what they are doing and you should look for a different company.
Heh I am glad I have not had many colleagues like this, but 1-2 this is 100% their modus operandi. Even worse though is when management understands this and passively rewards it by not intervening. In one case it got so bad the employee was promoted because they finally shipped something new. A very short time after feature delivery (and being promoted), serious customer bugs started trickling in. Well you know what happened next, more gas lighting.
I'd like to say there were finally some consequences, but no. The office was thrown a curve ball with large layoffs. Now that I think about it, maybe my ex colleague masterfully planned the whole thing.
I see the same problem. Reviewing some internal metrics, at least half the team members were basically producing nothing. No artifacts of any kind over months on end.
Overall productivity was the same. The remaining folks were producing significantly more and burning out. They actually lost work life balance, working way beyond 9-5 hours.
In this case, I don’t think my company has figured out how to manage remote workers. Even the direct managers appear checked out, delegating their own responsibilities to this group of ICs who are burned out.
That is a huge problem at the majority of places I have worked. I think that really comes into play when they have too many employees and not enough projects.
Some of them know, couple of them quite new hires who started with a very bad performance (I've no clue how the hell this is possible! - maybe my fault)
Also I openly discussed all these issues and invite them to find a solution all together. So far not going well.
In some cases after being informed of possible serious consequences their performance got back to normal for a month or two then cycle repeated itself. So maybe every 2 months I should remind them that they very close to getting sacked.
They do work, we had a director who did all that in a previous company (probably unintentionally), and things ground to a halt and productivity fell to zero.
Oh, I understand the problem; it was "management error #2", I think. And I understand that discussing it here will have little real impact on the managers concerned. I got off that train personally and no longer work as anyone's employee.
I hope that my contributions to discussions like this will encourage others to do the same, and that maybe, if those people one day have employees of their own, they will be a little smarter than the managers of today and the industry will be better for it.
In the meantime, I don't see why we should place any faith in the established practices of managers who, as an industry, run more projects that fail than projects that succeed. Can you name any other industry where it would be considered acceptable by the market if over 50% of the products bought failed, even if the costs ran to millions? I sure can't, it's just that the management idiocy is so widespread in IT that the market seems resigned to the inevitability that whatever they pay for will be crap that doesn't work properly.
I don't think this is because of tech work. I think this is because of bad management, which is not restricted to tech work. It's probably not even more common in tech work.
This reminds me of Toyota, which (allegedly) never let anyone off after process improvements, because that would undermine the trust which is necessary for employees to feel safe when suggesting improvements.
These stories seem to me like management failures — leaders haven’t built the necessary trust.
I worked at a company that had our team in a monthlong rolling crisis born of bad management.
They wanted updates for the director who didn’t even understand the technical issues at least twice daily. Frequently, it was done over a teams channel so it was a rolling half hour text conversation/distraction trying to explain technical issues to someone who was bad at listening. By the end of it I was ready to sabotage the project just to end it.
Things usually get that way for a reason and that reason is that no one who matters is interested in fixing things. And those who suffer these inefficiencies usually have learnt helplessness and made themselves ok with the situation (or left after the polite amount of time, 6–24 months depending on the country)
Even then, the chances of the org being open to change are very slim as we both seem to have experienced. Do you really want to put your health on the line for a small chance at fixing a company that’s not even yours and isn’t very likely to reward you for the waste reduction anyway? I know I don’t and quit rather than try to fix.
feels like you have not yet had problems with bad management. Bad management can drive into the ground even a great team with very responsible engineers. They will try to fight the restrictions, burn out, and then simply give up by quitting.
This is the story that keeps unfolding again and again in front my own eyes at my work, alas.
Wow, that was exactly the mechanic I observed when working there. The result was pockets in the company where people worked on stuff that they didn't understand and were not (yet?) clued in that nothing they did would get them promoted and yet if they broke anything it would get them fired. Helping those groups to change things for the better should have been a pretty impressive thing, but my observation was that wasn't understood by the promotion committee.
Also seems to ignore these aren't replacement parts, these are your team mates or reports, actual humans with names and families attached. If they weren't coasting or not showing up for work, what you describe sounds like yet another alienating, dehumanizing process at work.
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