To quote Franz Ferdinand: You’re lucky! You’re lucky lucky lucky!!!
Except for Batman (protocols?). And Zatanna (mind-wiping?). And… Why aren’t our heroes better than we are?
sigh Even my little 7 person workplace has bullshit. When I worked at a place with only 2 other people, including the boss who was rarely there, there was bullshit. It happens, the trick is finding a place where you aren’t buried in it.
Yes. Give it a try.
Most of the people I’ve known who think that getting ahead is all "stroking your boss’s ego and being “easy to deal with” " don’t really know what it means to do a good job.
They can’t differentiate between a good worker, and themselves, so they fall back on “it’s all bullshit” or “it’s all playing the game” or “it’s all politics”.
Most people don’t get ahead because they suck.
I have to disagree with you there. Most people in my department do an excellent job, but the only ones I’ve seen get ahead are the ones stroking the egos or threatening to leave. Out of the four people who’ve gotten promoted within the last six months, only one had any experience whatsoever in our industry and her experience was not at all directly related.
So I guess it depends on where you work and what your management is like. It’s not hard to want to do a good job for good management - I would have been willing to bend over backward for my old boss; but wanting to do a good job for ineffective or inattentive (read, pays attention, not micromanages) management is much more difficult. I do my work and I do it well, but I’ve become dubious about whether it makes a damn bit of difference. So I stopped caring and instead try to focus on the satisfaction of doing something well.
Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
Hey, Zee had the support of the other members. no BS or back-biting there.
As for Brucie … okay, I got nothing. I’ve never understood why Wonder Woman, Aquaman, or Flash never got fed up and clocked him.
Don’t know of all jobs, but putting up with BS has been a major - at times THE major - requirement of the fulltime jobs I have had since college.
The boss may not always be right, they are, however, always the boss. If they want to waste my time, that is their prerogative. No problem by me, so long as the paychecks keep coming.
I am fortunate enough to be in a job that pretty much requires 8 hour days. So silly assignments and time wasters do not require that I stay late or bring work home.
Folks have mentioned meetings. Walking into EVERY meeting at work, my sole thought is that I am going to derive NOTHING of interest or value, and am simply going to have my time wasted for the duration of the meeting. But if I’m going to receive my hourly wage for simply sitting there and being bored, I can live with that. My sole responsibility is to seem somewhat interested (or at least not obviously betray my boredom and disdain). Heck - sometimes they have muffins or cookies! The WORST thing I could do is reveal my true feelings, or express anger or disdain for management actions and decisions.
If you find yourself unable to tolerate the level and type of BS involved in your job, I suggest you either change your attitude or change your job.
I’m curious as to what people actually mean when they say “bullshit”, what their job is and what industry they work in. I was a mid-level manager in a management consulting firm so I know bullshit. I’ve even shoveled a bit of it myself.
Consulting is a little different from most industries. The basic premise is that most people don’t want to actually DO anything but advise clients, sell projects and let someone else do the actual work. And the group I was in was run by complete retards, even by consulting standards. Most of them were aloof, unavailable, disinterested and had no regard for anyone.
I don’t mind the bullshit when it works in MY favor though.
Here’s the thing. sandra_nz has the right attitude. You need to care enough about the work to do what you are asked to do and do it well, but not so much that you personalize everything. Just do what they tell you to do, how they tell you do do it.
And the best opinion to have is no opinion.
Lucky You. You’ve worked for good people. I worked as a programmer for 20 years, much of it as a consultant, and I was “blessed” with some of the most inept, incompetent and clueless managers ever to walk the planet. Then I left that field and got into Security, where I had good bosses at one place, but horrible corrupt pieces of human filth as bosses at the other two.
Your sample size is small and you’ve been lucky. Don’t allow that to convince you that the problem doesn’t exist.
I had a job with no bullsht once. We all had a real voice in what the company did and how it ran.
There were only 8 total employees, we didn’t always make payroll, and even when we did I was only earning a bit more than minimum wage – in Washington DC.
I loved that job. I would have kept it if I could cover my rent out of one paycheck. But no, rent was more than half my net pay.
Yup. I find that, all respect to Karl M., if I’m a little alienated from my labor, I’m a lot happier.
You’re unlucky! Unlucky unlucky unlucky! I have had to deal with it in the one… two… three… four… eight jobs I’VE had since college. I always do an exceptional job at all my jobs (whether it’s a part-time restaurant job, job at a non-profit, job managing call center employees, job in radio, whatever) and just being good at what I do was and is not good enough to get raises, bonuses, promotions, and not targeted for harrassment.
It’s true, some people can’t seem to succeed and they blame politics or the vagaries of their boss. I’m not one of those people. I doubt that every single poster in this thread who’s responded about workplace bullshit is one of those people. You’ve found a good workplace with little to no non-real work bs to deal with. Take the responses in this thread to heart and be glad you don’t have to deal with it. Be glad that the quality of your work, your professionalism, your productivity, etc. are what you’re being judged on. Because a LOT of people aren’t. Including programmers I know.
AND I know a lot of people who HAVE gotten ahead, and it’s because they have successfully dealt with the bullshit. And they still have to deal with bullshit even at their higher level positions!
I have come to realize that it’s just the Way of Work. It’s illogical and silly and it detracts from why we’re all here. I just want to do a good job and be rewarded for it. So does everyone else I know that has to deal with it.
Chimera nailed it.
I’ve been a programmer for the past 12 years, and have been fortunate enough to have never needed to shovel out any bullshit. So it’s not the only way to succeed, but only if you find the right place.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by honest and integrity. If not telling someone that they’re being an asshole and making your job much harder, but instead trying to help them for the nth time without losing your temper or pleasant demeanor falls under dishonesty, then I’ve lied all the damn time at work. Three of the dozen people I’ve been supervising have generated 3/4ths of my workload this past month, and I never yelled at them for being willful, needy, sloppy and argumentive, which is what I felt like doing.
Nor did I or my fellow middle-management types throw a screaming fit when we learned Friday that these same incompetent subordinants get a raise this week, but we who put up with their shit do not despite not having gotten one any more recently (2.5 years ago!) than they did.
My statement was overly broad and a bit harsh, based mostly on residual personal issues with my last management group. All former cops, all corrupt and lacking in personal integrity. Lied straight to my face, the lied to their own bosses faces when called on their shit.
It would probably be more accurate to say that Honesty and Integrity have less value on the Management Track than one would desire or expect.
I don’t think anyone is actually say…wait, let me re-skim… K. Yeah. Nobody is saying “it’s all bullshit.” Hard work goes into it, too. Just that there seems to be a large amount of bullshit. And anyone who defines it in such black and white terms is, themselves, FOS.
Or, get tired of playing the game and plant their feet, or decide that they just plain don’t want to. One of the nurses I manage is a great educator. Has been here for 11 years. Could’ve had my job just by snapping her fingers. She doesn’t want it. Says she hates the baggage that goes with it and is happy where she is, thank you. Here. Have your brush back.
As for the OP:
Any meeting that goes on for two hours is an abomination; it was either poorly planned or poorly conducted - or maybe just poorly conceived. *
As for making the boss look good, well, yes, that’s part of the game; so is watching your back; so is spotting the Backstabbers, and learning how to trip them up. If you do your job well and are even minimally politic, you can do this. (I’m not very good at this myself, but I try. I call it Teamwork.)
- In my Perfect World, anyone who calls a meeting must drink a pint or half gallon (depending on gender) of water immediately before & coffee during the meeting
I’d say yes. Sometimes I’m right, but it doesn’t matter…things must be done another way.
My boss is trying to teach me to be more mellow and open. I admit, I have little patience for other people’s mistakes, mainly because we’re the department that has to fix them. But, that’s the nature of the business, and I might as well submit to the inevitable.
That said, my boss’s “No’s” are listened to, because she picks her battles.
See, I knew that my office was a-okay when, in the middle of a very boring meeting, my eager-beaver team manager tipped his notepad towards me so that I could approve of his intricate drawing of Cthulhu… lactating. I had to clap my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing in the middle of the CTO’s big speech.
That, and our mutual boss dropped the f-bomb during his interview.
I like my office.
At my former employer, the bullshit got to a point where I had to leave since I thought I was losing my sanity.
Basically, there’s no structure in the group I worked for. It’s more or less your typical management pyramid with each level treated as a pool of staff and directors of varuous levels. Each level can grab and assign work to the pool below it. The problem is that each staff member can be assigned multiple projects led by multiple directors across multiple practice areas. So essentially at any time you can have eight different bosses, none of which who are coordinating with each other.
It’s hard to convey the total lunacy of the operation. Each director, regardless of level, appears to live in a fantasy world of their own hype and self importance. Basically the whole group runs on hype, favoritism, cronyism, and how many hours you can get away with billing to clients.
Probably why at 4 years, I was one of the most tenured employees. 1-2 years is more common.