This week, one of my co-workers is taking vacation time while he relocates to California. Although he expects to resume work in a few days, I am really feeling the fact that he is not here at the moment. Unfortunately, because overtime is basically prohibited in my division, I’m not at liberty to put in extra time to deliver what people need… instead, I have to delay their projects for days or weeks because they are stuck in the queue behind more urgent issues.
That creates three kinds of pain.
- I’m unhappy because I can’t earn overtime.
- The customer (an internal employee) is unhappy because their project won’t be delivered on time.
- The company is unhappy as a whole because it fails to deliver major milestones on time.
Now, the main problem with that last bit is that if I abide by the “no overtime” rule while this co-worker is out, when the time comes for blame on a late project, it’s going to trickle right down to me. I hate the blame game, but I know how it works.
The President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the product is late. The Vice-Presidents quickly confer to decide who to blame among them, and solemnly intone, “Most of us aren’t to blame: it was Development’s fault.” The Senior Directors in Development are called together by the Vice President of Development to account for the delay; after a consultation with the members of their teams, they blame one of their Directors. That Director calls together his Managers, who confer and blame one of themselves. The Manager talks to his team members, and the team members confer and blame one of their own. The chosen team member protests, “I wasn’t allowed to work overtime!” to his manager. The manager tells the Director it was the Director’s policy against overtime which slowed down the project, the Director tells the Vice-President that it was his budget cuts which prevented overtime allowing timely delivery of the project, and the Vice-President says “I can’t tell the President that, it would mean my job!” so he fires the poor sop who did the work and blamed the lack of overtime, then the VP promises the President immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.
Luckily, the wheels of corporatocracies turn slowly. My way out is to hope that a co-worker leaves the company within the next year, then when the Fit hits the Shan several months down the road with product delays, I can blame the former co-worker. Thus the Vice-President will hear from his minions that the problem is already solved, and can claim dramatic efficiency improvements, including forcing out that unproductive worker in Cube 20286 at the data center who was responsible for this massive project delay.
This will fuel positive spin about the product that the delays are actually the result of improved processes and attention to detail. This will build buzz about the product, resulting in increased stock prices, then the product will be released and stock prices will fall.
At which point the President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the stock price is falling. Ultimately some poor schmuck somewhere is going to be blamed, fired, and his job outsourced to India so that the Vice-President of Profiteering promise immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.
I love Corporate America.
Can feel your pain..
I’ve been in that type of situation before. I would assume that it is safe to say that there is noone “filling-in” for the person who is relocating. So long as that is true, I would have to say that there could be a business case made for using hours that the missing engineer would have been using (if he was there). Business case could be made in regards to missing revenue if the product doesn’t hit the market on time. If the product is being developed for an outside client – Is there a penalty that the customer will charge to the Ultramegacorp ?
Sorry to hear that you are running through a rough patch, sounds like a grin-and-bear it kind of time.
Yeah, was just down
Yeah, I was just feeling down yesterday.
There’s a certain amount of workload that must be performed locally. Most sysadmins know what these cases are: reinstalls of machines, backup tapes, emergency boots, disk recoveries, hardware replacement, local troubleshooting, and that kind of thing. What’s happened is that we used to have a department of six on-site engineers and three off-site engineers, two of whom were slated to move on-site. We were BUSY. Dang busy, all the time. Still are, but worse.
The two off-siters who were slated to become on-site switched companies in order to avoid the relocation. Two of our on-site engineers also went to a new employer. One was briefly replaced by an EXCELLENT contractor who really knew his stuff, but he too left because they wouldn’t offer competitive wages and employment benefits. One of our on-site people has relocated to California. So here we sit, three people doing the job of six here in the data center.
One might say, “throw me a bone here!”. Sure. We did. The Director says, “you have fourteen new people in India who want you to give them more to do.” The net effect of that effort is that I spend more and more time doing things which require presence in the data center… and that’s not the cool, fun work. The cool, fun work gets shipped off to those working off-site while I get to bandage another knuckle sliced open while repairing another machine.
And publish a comment on my blog because I need just a few moments away from staring at my ever-lengthening queue of stuff that has to get done before I leave for the day.
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Matthew P. Barnson