The tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else is so true. I had a boss that insinuated I was inexperienced because I didn’t know his specific internal process (which was complete nonsense because he is literally illiterate and cannot read or write).
When I politely corrected him that this was my second job in this specific industry he paused before continuing to ramble as if I’m some intern when I was with the company for 3 years in a midlevel role.
Same guy who once gave me a 30 mins lecture about how much he wants women like me and his daughter to succeed and “have a voice”, literally without letting me insert more than 1 word the entire time.
All this is great if you’re working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
It’s funny that people claim ownership of companies by individuals (capitalism) is so efficient when there are extreme and obvious problems when the distant private equity board needs an entire department to tell them what the company does and how well every few months, compared to y’know, ownership by people who work there and would know how well the company (and their part of it) is doing just by actually being remotely involved.
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be “scalable agile”. By “scalable”, they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about “Extreme Programming” or “Agile” being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
We have SAFe at my office too. It seems to me that it’s just a way to say you’re agile while still being waterfall.
I’d love a job like this and I’m not even joking
It’s okay even fun at first, but eats your soul slowly over the years. Edit: that ofcourse depends on perspective e.g. what you are doing at the moment. I myself moved from an abusive job to a cozy corporate one, it seemed like heaven at first.
Think of it that way: those nice people are sending you money every month and all you have to do is go there and look busy. Certainly not the most rewarding way to spend your day but having money is nice.
My thing is, as long as I’m not bored at work I’m good. If I’m being paid to look busy but can’t keep myself busy I’m going to feel like my brains are boiling away. But if I can actually keep myself entertained and busy and get paid for it? Hell yeah!
Forced password resets.
Entropy defeats recall.
Desk blooms with secrets.Ah, white collar haiku…
I was in a band called White Collar Haiku.
We mostly did Huey Lewis and the News covers.
