Hey, Rupert,
Sure you weren't working in the same place I was?
One of the first my boss told me was to avoid any extra assignments like the plague or else you'll be stuck w/ the responsibility forever!
"Who owns that software module?"
<Fires up the source control....>
"Last commit was by Bob last week on Thursday. I guess he owns it now."
As to poor large scale projects that could have an ObTrav in that any Trav gov't could do the same:
City of Ottawa wants light rail. They make a weak initial foray and get one line that goes between two modestly useful endpoints. Then it moves on to a more fulsome concept but goes to competition. It hires a group that failed to deliver the project until 16 months after delivery date. And since then, train wheels crack, trains derail, train wheels go out of round, stinking in the stations, flooding in the stations, no traction station tiles in a country with winter, undersized underground and above ground systems, problems with the catenary power gear (overhead) in the winter, doors that jam open or shut, central management computers that can all (including backups) kick off, no line bypasses or spare trains, never meeting the 13 train at a time level until about 2 years after the delivery date.
And it was worse because they let go of all the bus drivers that were going to be made surplus within 30 days of receiving the system. And then they limped along for a year plus of misery with maybe 9 or 7 trains available on a day... so they had to hire back NEW drivers and the whole system was a mess.
Talking about looking for reasons to get rid of people:
My wife, while having hip and back problems, was working in Costco's national HQ in optical. They used to have 3 people doing inventory control (managing tens of thousands of SKUs) but the manager chased one back to being an optician in a store, another back to a warehouse (store) to work there instead, and that left my wife doing all of that (beyond what any ICS should be tasked with individually). She also had to train the new assistant buyer (not in her job description), and handle another +20-30% addition of new SKUs.
Then, when she told them she needed to go off for her hip surgery (she told them well in advance as they'd want and she was a responsible employee), they constructed reasons to fire her (citing issues in disciplinary proceedings that even the person notifying her could not explain or identify, just saying 'it had to be there' - from who? why?). Anyway, the excuse they used was not meeting performance objectives. She's never *had* a written one and the only (of the list of made up write-ups she got) that had any validity was that she was asked by the assistant buyer to do up a report and he had some far out Excel magic in there (and Cathy was never trained in Excel nor did she ever have it listed as a job requirement) so she sent it to him (not to the customer) to make sure she had it right... and they wrote her up for that. And when they were firing her for not meeting performance standards (never given nor reviewed with her nor shown to exist), they were ignoring the fact she did the job of 3 ICSes for months while her back was getting worse and she also trained the assistant buyer and did other duties not in her job description because she was asked to by the buyer/assistant buyer or another person up the chain.
So here's what I learned:
a) Even large corporations that could have their butt sued off can be stupid and evil at the same time
b) A company that is a multi-national entity but whose Canadian HQ only very recently got the *first* person in their HR department with an HR certificate (the head of HR had been an accountant) means that the laws surrounding the treatment of employees can be ignored apparently
c) Nepotism and feudalism and sexism is alive in well (the director that ran her out of town, because he was behind the bogus write ups) didn't like people who speak truth to power and my Cat is a straight shooter and honest
d) The company's power structure determines everything; If you are a middle manager with a patron, you can violate laws, mismanage, waste tens of thousands of dollars due to incompetence and nothing will happen
e) If you are an employee:
- get all job requirements in writing
- get all reviews in writing
- do not accept work outside of your key tasks without a written directive to do so that is clear about the extents and priority and that the person ordering it knows the consequences to other duties normally done
- summarize all meetings in emails after the fact - who said what, what was agreed, and anything not said that was implied - and print copies to go into your logbook and send it to the manager with "Please review to ensure the meeting's contents were fully agreed upon. If I do not hear back, I will assume the understanding herein applies. If you have any concerns, please notify me immediately."
- Keep a very accurate log of any tasks you are formally to do and especially with things beyond that
- Don't accept verbal notifications (immediately send an email stating "In our conversation, you said ..... <new direction>. You wish me to put aside other scheduled duties for this activity as I understand it. Is that correct?")
- If you are getting sick, give the company NO heads up. If they show the slightest lack of desire to support you, don't push it. Just wait until you are going off and get your doctor to write a letter at that time. You give them heads up, it makes their scheduling for your absence easier. It also lets them construct a paper trail to fire you.
- Promises of stock options, bonuses, etc. are never matched by the work you do to get them
- Having boundaries and working a few hours more is okay (you want to show your work ethic) but working 800 hours of overtime unpaid in a year is a crime against yourself (did that...) and unless your job says you work weekends or shift work, don't accept that. Scheduling of projects so they don't end up dumpster fires is encouraged if you push back on the fact you have a life and a crisis in the project is NOT your issue if it could reasonably have been foreseen and a contingency ready to handle it was foolishly not established. I had a boss that used to say to middle managers he was knocking 10% off of our carefully laid out tight bids and he'd just push (bully) the developers to work late and get it done. That is planning for a broken schedule and nobody should support that.
- A lot of senior management in corporations are to some degree on the psychopathy spectrum. Amoral conduct is acceptable in business.
I have worked at places with great middle and upper middle management and with reasonable deadlines and we got a lot of hard work done but people had lives. That's how it should be done and we hit on-time, close to budget, and with all critical features working and a bunch of the nice to haves too. That sounds like modest success, but for large software projects, something near to half just fail period. Of the remainder, on-time/on-budget/feature complete - pick one usually if that. I was on one that was feature complete only 6 months after delivery date and it involved thousands of unpaid overtime hours and the budget was $600K in the red.
TomB