I'm Out of Steam

[4legsgood]

I spent my last couple of years at work taking more walks, keeping my office tidy, gradually removing all personal items, documenting my systems, automating everything I could, and avoiding large new projects.

 

[Walt34]

You’re evaluated on the performance of non-existent employees? How does that work?

It's not my job to run the train,
The whistle I can't blow.
It's not my job to say how far
The train's supposed to go.
I'm not allowed to pull the brake,
Or even clang the bell.
But let the damn thing leave the track
And see who catches hell!

 

[akidagain2018]

I'm in a similar position. Park of why I need to leave is I want to protect my professional reputation from the crazy actions of leadership. And so I fear getting blamed for their 'mistakes' in professional judgment. Better to not be part of the group. It's a strange place to be.

 

[Chuckanut]

They then push this down, and some really weird stuff happens in the middle, like increasing sales goals by 10% while simultaneously reducing R&D budgets by 10%. This kind of thing is especially true in tech, in a product that may only have a time horizon left of 5 years or so.

Chaos ensues.

To the C-suite, it makes sense. That division is a legacy division. They will sunset eventually. So, reduce their budget for the future. Meanwhile, what they have is a great product, so another 10% of sales this year should be no big deal, right?

After it gets down to the boots on the ground, it is chaotic. Layoffs. No budget for test equipment. Totally unreasonable schedules. Etc. It takes a very large human toll and people do some weird things.

Does the boss have pointy hair? And offer advice such as "To save IT money the use of colons is banned. From now on employees are only to use semi-colons in their letters, memos and texts".

 

[akidagain2018]

The "Style Guide" -- people actually spend time on this stuff, who aren't secretaries. What a waste of brain cells. And they conclude this like only one space between sentences, with no regard to it being grammatically incorrect, last time I checked.

 

[Clone]

What I have found at my Megac*rp is that the top leaders, the C-suite or whatever they are called, make decisions based strictly on numbers. Numbers to move the stocks.

A friend of mine was in charge of maintenance on the factory machines in one of our major plants. The brass came in all excited one day (they must have gone to an MBA seminar someplace) about spiffing up the place and implementing preventive maintenance. They asked him what it would take to bring all of the machines up to date on their maintenance, and then keep them there.

He did the math. They gasped when they saw the number, and gave him 20% of that. Which was almost as much as what they had spent the previous year on emergency machine down maintenance, just trying to keep the lights on!

Standard mode of operation, run the equipment until it fails or is not capable of producing acceptable parts. When the machine goes down, outsource the parts. Huge surprise when the cost on the parts goes up radically. Justify buying a new machine based on the projected cost savings. Rinse and repeat. The factory guys spent almost all of their time fire-fighting.