pioneer98 wrote:I think I ranted about it in some other thread, but we still doing it. We have a meeting every day called a WIG huddle. WIG stands for "wildly important goals".
Egad. That's like a kid's acronym. Like ROUS's in The Princess Bride. I bet they just wanted it to be a word, so they looked for a W word to tack on.
If you were in Boston it could have been "Wicked Important Goals."
Pretty much everything about the culture of work is just awful. Let us count the ways.
-Pointless meetings often held just because they are scheduled even though there is no actual purpose
-Business fads and jargon sustained by people who have to try to appear important and useful
-Rampant discrimination against all those who want to do good steady work, but don't want to devote their lives to advancement and self-promotion
-Massive barriers to workers who would like to make a change
-Control by bosses who don't bother to understand how work actually gets done
-Control by bosses who make insane demands and blame workers for not meeting them
It seems likely that my girlfriend is in the process of being forced out of her job by a boss who made impossible demands, had no understanding of what it would take to do what he asked, refused to listen to feedback on the required time and resources, and who gave her a bottom rating (preventing her from transferring) even after she severely damaged her own health in an attempt to comply. So long as we have an economy that offers so little opportunity, employers have enormous latitude for exploitation. It's hard for me to express how angry this [expletive] makes me.
You really hit this out of the park, AD. These especially resonated:
Arthur Dent wrote:-Business fads and jargon sustained by people who have to try to appear important and useful
-Control by bosses who don't bother to understand how work actually gets done
-Control by bosses who make insane demands and blame workers for not meeting them
That sounds like a terrible place to work for your girlfriend.
The setup we have here is the matrix style of management. On top of having my normal supervisor, I also report to managers on all the projects I'm assigned. Right now I have 3 main projects, so 4 total managers. The thing that annoys me the most about how we operate is that a couple of these projects are on totally unrealistic timelines. Everyone is 99% certain the schedule will have to be revised. But they never, ever come out and tell us that. Each project manager wants to keep the urgency level high on their project. They never want theirs to be the one that gets put on the backburner. So when they tell me they need something by Friday, I often know they are lying to my face. It's like playing poker. In order to figure out which project is the most important you have to read these guys and maybe try to get some back channel info through the grapevine about the "real" timeline. Because all we ever get is a fake, but urgent, timeline. It's a giant game.
I guess my only recourse is that most people understand it is all a game, and so when we inevitably fail to meet the timelines its not USUALLY treated as a personal failure. But it still is very annoying because all we ever get is a string of failures. We never, ever, succeed and meet an actual deadline.
One of my projects really is on a tight deadline for real. So that is all I'm really working on right now. The other managers are trying really hard to goad me into false urgency for their projects, but it's not working. They will just have to be disappointed for now.
We have a consultant meeting next week I'm dreading. It really feels like all these changes they suggest are only to justify their having a job. Tell a reporter to cut her hair-- next meeting, say she needs to grow it out. Say we need to focus locally more-- next meeting, it's cast a wider net. None of these have had a marked effect on ratings.
JL21 wrote:You really hit this out of the park, AD. These especially resonated:
Arthur Dent wrote:-Business fads and jargon sustained by people who have to try to appear important and useful
-Control by bosses who don't bother to understand how work actually gets done
-Control by bosses who make insane demands and blame workers for not meeting them
I'm really sorry to hear about your girlfriend.
Agreed.
I'm saying this from experience, I'm a manager. When you are in the trenches and you get that feeling that your management chain is incompetent? Well, it's true. More true than you even know. I used to think there was just stuff above me that I didn't know that didn't allow me to form a complete picture, and some of the bizarre decisions had some hidden logic. Not true. I don't understand how work gets done because most of it they just dumped in my lap over the years, and there is no way I can really understand it. The only thing I will say to pat myself on the back is that I'm not a dick, and I push back pretty hard above me and just trust that if someone below me tells me something takes X time then I go with it. I can come across very confidently at times even though I don't have the foggiest idea what I am talking about, so alot of times it works.
But really I have no idea what I am doing at my job. I feel like I do when I wake up in the middle of the night in a strange room where it is pitch dark trying to find the bathroom. I know the goal, I just don't know how to get there without hurting myself.
MrCrowesGarden wrote:We have a consultant meeting next week I'm dreading. It really feels like all these changes they suggest are only to justify their having a job. Tell a reporter to cut her hair-- next meeting, say she needs to grow it out. Say we need to focus locally more-- next meeting, it's cast a wider net. None of these have had a marked effect on ratings.
Hey, totally called that one.
Six months ago, I was told we were losing focus on the fact that we are a local news station and were sacrificing that news to get in more national/world stories. I was told that local news needed to be more of an emphasis.
Today, it was "when did we lose sight of new content, no matter where it comes from?" They want to know why we've seemed to abandon one of their favorite buzz phrases, "news without borders" (which has also changed meaning at least 3 times since I've been there.)
