Random Work Thoughts
In the IT field, there are problems. While some of those problems involve bad technical decision making, the rest are just office politic problems and my thought on these are below.
A blog that I’ve subscribed to, and that I find interesting is The Context Of Things. It’s one of the few blogs I’ve found that really says what I feel sometimes.
Office Politics
Anyone who calls you “buddy” is not your buddy.
Watch out if anyone ever tells you they want to “mentor” you. I hate the word so much that when a student asks me to mentor them, I first tell them to stop using that word, and agree to “help” them.
When someone offers to mentor you because you remind them of their younger self, there are two things at work: They see you as an extension of their ego and they’re feeding into your desire to become bigger than you are. When someone powerful says you remind them of themselves, it makes you think that you can become powerful.
Holiday parties are fine, but sometimes they’re taken more serious than the actual work.
I never understood people who leave food in the work fridge indefinitely. Someone has to clean that up, eventually.
There are genuinely bad people in the workplace. Some of them know they’re bad and don’t care, but most of them don’t realize that they’re bad. I’ll never know, because I don’t know what’s in people’s minds or their hearts.
It took me too long to realize this.
CYA = Cover Your Ass. I have seen people sell out their coworkers to avoid responsibility for a screwup. I have seen those same people get promoted.
Work
In an eight-hour workday, most people only do about 4-6 hours of work. The rest are spent grabbing coffee, chatting about last night’s sports ball game, and then going to the bathroom because you drank a lot of coffee.
Once of the benefits to working from home is that the extra 2 hours is now spent doing your laundry, cleaning the kitchen, etc.
I hate meetings. I’ll probably write an entire article about how much I hate meetings, but here’s a summary:
Some meetings are okay and useful, especially brainstorming and strategy meetings.
Most meetings are just an excuse for people to get out of doing actual work.
When you’re in a meeting, look around the table and think to yourself, “Do all these people need to be here?” You might also wonder, “Do I need to be here?”
Process
The IT Industry is so obsessed with how they do things (the process) instead of what they’re doing.
Every five years the process methodology (PMP, ITIL, etc.) everyone is using is considered obsolete and everyone will have to get trained on the new process methodology.
People who don’t understand technology will substitute the implementation of processes to give the illusion that they’re accomplishing something.