We were doing microprocessor design work, so it wasn’t something that correlates to hours. Some of the later work was useful, definitely, and we often had late calls with our fab in Taiwan. And the company was doing fine. Screwing the average worker was company policy. Individuals never got recognized because top management was scared they’d get poached. We got bought - before that the CEO made it a practice to have corporate culture recognize individuals with big and small rewards, and we were pretty loyal.
When I worked at Intel our project started dinners (voluntary, but they took names) to show we were as tough as the competing project. Everyone felt they had to stay until 9, but no real work was done. The more recent case was not that bad. People stayed to get one more thing done, out of loyalty. (We got paid pretty well.) But when people’s loyalty got ignored every year, people decided to just leave rather than start the next thing, or get one more cup of coffee and wait out the traffic.
People were effectively giving themselves hourly raises by reducing their hours. I’m noting the “shock, shock” of HR that people did this. And people did leave. I was too close to retirement to, but I did enjoy working less.
Ah, so you worked for a company where people actually made something. No wonder management hated the employees. 
Mostly I’ve just spent the past year idle or really super busy doing what seemed like really dumb and useless bullshit for a largely unpleasant and inept client.
Now I’m back to being idle but at least I’m billing the client for my wasted time.
Honestly, some of these senior management types at some of these large companies, I have no fucking idea what, if anything they do. And there are all these layers of them and they get paid a lot of money. I don’t get it.
Go to meetings. Duh. And call meetings. Many think that anyone who does anything is somehow deficient. I’m lucky in that I worked for tech companies where most of the top 2 or 3 levels of management actually understand stuff. Above that they’ve forgotten it or never knew it.
Don’t knock it. One of my kids works from home, calls or participates in meetings, and makes good money at it. I’d go crazy if I did that but my preference for having a small enough group even when I was a manager probably hurt my career - though it made me happy.
Meetings to discuss making a plan for producing a schedule to plan for discussing why we have so many meetings. If you don’t have meetings, how do you know that the work of scheduling and planning is getting done? And make sure you capture the minutes so everybody can review what was discussed with regard to the planning schedule and schedule plans.
Stranger
it’s hard to find these days but you should read John DeLorean’s book on working for gm…a lot of it was different versions of your post …if anyone needs to know why the us car industry went to hell in the 70s that’s pretty much the book on it
I brought my kids to the office for “Bring Your Children to Work Day”. My daughter loved it. She told her mom “It was great! We drew pictures, then we watched a movie, and we had lunch, and everybody talked about themselves!”
My wife was like "I thought your company was going to show the kids what you do at work?:
Me: That basically IS what I do at work.
Things have actually seemed to calm down, workload-wise. So now I can’t really complain about work without sounding like a dick. But it’s also a bit of a case study in how mediocrity evolves in these big companies:
We spent the past several months spending all hours working on boring, tedious bullshit, but lots of it. One of my younger colleagues quit with no job lined up (and supporting a child) to pursue something more in line with what she wants to do (which is ironically the same stuff I was doing and ostensibly should be doing, but I digress). Another very senior FTE lost his shit and rage quit (creating an HR issue in the process), but he was on a path to get fired (presumably. It’s just as likely IMHO they would have just dumped him somewhere else).
I stuck around and now things are much more reasonable and I don’t have to forgo my six figure salary to spend my days on LinkedIn while having my wife glare at me.
So now I’m well positioned to just coast on through Q4, billing my 40 hours to the client, which is traditionally a slow period with the holidays and year end code freezes and clients figuring out their spending for next year.
I’m at the top of my pay scale and not up for promotion, so there’s no real incentive to put in “extra effort”. I’m not sure what that even looks like as on paper my “effort” is largely defined by how much I bill and or manage or sell, which I can’t really control anyway. Ironically, having less work to do at the client gives me more time to help with firm “practice development” bullshit or sales, which is actually more interesting anyway, giving the appearance of “more effort”.
To get promoted, I would need to be assigned to a much bigger project (again, dependent on someone else selling it first), but then I’d be continuously responsible for running or selling projects at that size (a dubious proposition, given the turnover at that level).
Problem is we have a lot of people at the level above me because they were working on big accounts for a few years. I don’t mind putting on a show helping out when it interests me, but part of me is also like “You got the title and salary. YOU figure out how to run the group, dummy.”
We also have a lot of partners and salespeople who seem like they are just coasting on managing their existing big accounts without any real growth. So that’s something to think about long term.
In sort, the culture has created a situation where an ordinarily ambitious employees is content to just sort of coast, while positioning himself for his next role once the boat runs out of steam.
Anyhow, I had my one client call for the day, so I think I’ll go for a jog and see if our sales leadership call gets cancelled (seems like a call that should be important enough to not get cancelled every week).
Yet the CEO gets a huge raise and bonus while the company pleads poverty when you ask for a raise adding to the demotivation.
From what I’ve seen in a lot of these big companies, allowing many of the employees to keep their jobs (at all levels) is generous enough.
When I was doing performance and salary review, we gave a 0% raise (the average was much higher) to someone we wanted to send a message to. My boss said it wouldn’t work, since these people are happy at not being fired. He was right.
IANAL, but it sounds dangerously close to what is legally considered a “constructive dismissal” if you don’t also provide some sort of feedback on their performance.
Are they having performance issues because they aren’t good at their job or because your company sucks and employees can’t figure out whose ass to kiss to obtain a good performance review? Because I’ve seen that a lot over the course of my career. A lot of companies are so dysfunctional, I have no idea how you can even tell people are doing their job.
Well. Finally got kicked off that project I hated. And it sounds like I’m going to start a new long term project with a different team that at least on paper seems to be a great fit for my background, experience, and lifestyle. So for all intents and purposes, it’s basically like starting a new job. So short of some radical career change or getting an offer for a ridiculous pay increase, I guess it makes sense to see how this new project plays out over the next few months.
You’re much funnier when you hate your job but genuinely glad to hear the news.
Yay! At last, a change!
I’ll be toasting you tonight (with a special Viognier we’ve been saving)!
So far a fairly positive change. Hard to tell how much actual work we’ll actually need to do. But at the very least, the project seems to align oddly close to my industry, technical, and subject matter expertise. The entire team is remote, but when I need to go to the client, it’s a convenient 8 minute ferry ride across the Hudson. The people seem a lot more pleasant as well, which is nice.
That said, I don’t know that I see a long term future with this company. I’m still pissed about my last project and after yet another “rejuggling” of our group, the company seems pretty directionless, and I don’t really see much of a path for promotion. And I don’t know that it’s the sort of job I can just hang out at for another 15 years (give or take) until I retire.