What is it with management in corporate America? I was in a staff meeting today with my manager and his manager there. Several pointy questions were asked (all of them very valid though and deserving a straight answer), and the guy sounded like a drunk politician slobbering out less than enlightening answers that were barely coherent. He back tracked constantly and didn't make any sense half the time. You could tell he didn't want to be there and was probably there so he could check off a cell in a spreadsheet that had "gone red" because he wasn't giving enough face time with the troops.
This event was just par for the course where I work. Management seems to be in a constant state of denial or worse just plain brain dead. They come up with really bad terminology to try and explain their half baked ideas. Examples can be found on any Bullshit Bingo cards you can download and play while management gives their presentation. The other day one of these clowns tried to use the word "fungibility" and used it completely the wrong way even after explaining why he was using the word itself.
What I find ironic is how much these managers get paid compared to what they do. They may justify it by saying they are working long hours over the weekends and late nights. I hate to tell them but, so is everyone else with a lot less pay.
Management lives in their insular little bubbles and appear to hire other dim bulbs to surround themselves with so they look like the bright one in the bunch. They went to MBA schools for that lesson?
A dream I have is to swap roles with managers at work. For one week I want managers to switch jobs with us front line techies. Make them sit and watch the trouble ticket queue listening to irate customers tell you how screwed up IT is. Their job is to have a working active directory up and running with 50 user accounts, a fully operational network load balanced SharePoint farm, and a CRM Oracle UNIX cluster working. Oh and if the Exchange server crashes because they didn't approve of the extra drive space expense they can "deal with that" too. Meanwhile the rest of us will fill up our calendars with meetings to talk about basically nothing at all, update our "dashboards" and then go over the budgets that we never adhere to anyway's. We will get to go out to lunch and dinner on the company dime because we are "working" very hard solving all of the crisis that were created by our predecessors incompetence. At the end of the week, we will then give each other pats on the back followed by hefty bonuses for another bang up job because well, that is just management 101 business as usual. Oh, let's check back in with management and see how they are doing. Wow, they got the servers racked and plugged in. Impressive! You guys deserve something special. How about a 5% pay cut because we are following industry standards? Don't like it? Well there is the door.
I know it is similar at other places just by doing a quick search on the web for corporate management incompetence. I hear it from friends working elsewhere. Why is Dilbert's PHB (PointyHaired Boss) so recognizable? Why is it that the boss on the movie "Office Space" and the TV show "The Office" so familiar to people?
In a way, I feel kind of sorry for them. Then I remember how much they make and what they do and I forget I had that thought.
No, no, no.... The subnet mask is NOT the same as the default gateway. Hey you over there! A cluster isn't called that just because they are CLOSE to each other. They actually have to you know, DO something. Oh boy..... Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.