There are 10,000 paths to failure.
The key to success is to avoid walking any of them.
I accepted a job offer at a different company, Friday/Monday (verbally on Friday; formally, Monday.) It's sort of exciting, starting a new job -- the opportunities are wide open, and there are just a million things one can do. This is somewhat true at an existing job, but one tends to "rut", no matter how hard one tries not to and, it seems, management and corporate culture seem to encourage that, even if one tries to break-out.
Several times in the past couple of days, people have asked me "why do you want to leave <current company>?" It's funny, but they ask it as if there were one, possibly two, reasons and, if I would only speak up, maybe they could fix those things, and then everyone would be happy.
It's funny that no one seems to have noticed that I've never had much of a problem letting everyone around me know just what I think the company is doing wrong and how I suggest they fix it. Pretty much, anyone who can't immediately think of 3 big reasons why I might want to leave, and then follow up with a dozen more after a minute's thought, well, I guess I'm not sure what I can conclude other than maybe that they either are the kind of person who doesn't listen to people like me, or maybe they just don't care. Either way, it struck me as ironic that they'd ask.<rant, rant, rant> Heh.
The funny thing is, I like most of the people I currently work with. By and large, they're nice, friendly, easy-going people. The other funny thing is: while these are great qualities that one looks for in a dinner companion, they aren't the most important qualities of a co-worker in a cutting-edge product-development work environment. Of course it's nice to work with nice, friendly people but, in order to actually produce great products, there needs a bit of criticality, a bit of bull-headedness, a bit of argumentativeness, a bit of "I'm sorry, Ted, but that's just not good enough! Please try again" attitude. Best if you can wrap all that up in a friendly and easy-going package but, if not, better to have the critical thinker than someone who just says nice things all the time.
There's one; 9,999 to go :)
I think that if I had a genie who would grant me one work-improvemet-related wish (or pick your favorite mechanism for dictating exactly one change-by-fiat to make work better), it'd be that any time anyone could call-out one of the decision makers as engaging in wishful-thinking, the decision under consideration would be tabled until they could demonstrate a thorough risk analysis and that their idea contains more fail-safe consideration than the likely-to-bite-you-in-the-ass kind. If I could figure out a way to word it so that people who attempted to massage the metrics to give a better impression than indicated by reality felt pain according to the level of dishonesty, I'd stick that in there, too.I understand that it can be just as dangerous to over-plan or be overly conservative as to under-plan or overly ...uh... "adventurous" -- but my current employer is so far off the scale toward "winging it" that I don't think that any possible harm could come from running, full-tilt, toward the other end of the spectrum for several months.
The Silver Bullet is another one (don't genies typically grant three wishes?!) TSB takes many forms, but they all boil down to some variation on either searching frantically for or trying to apply overly simplistic solutions to rather complex problems. Of course, the whole "is there anything we can do to convince you not leave?" thing is just the ultimate version of that -- no one leaves a job because of some thing that they think can be changed; that wouldn't make any sense! Finding a new job is hard -- especially so if you're narrowing your search to "jobs that suck less than my current one"! It'd be way easier to just let your boss know "hey, I'm not happy about <blah>", and let them fix it. Of course, what to do when they don't, right? I suppose you can let on "hey, I'm really unhappy about this thing, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have to tolerate it elsewhere..." It helps, when doing such negotiations, if you're right about that latter part. But the Silver Bullet Thinking thing is to look at one of your good people leaving for a dozen or more reasons that have been articulated over the past year and ask "is there anything we can do to change your mind?" It's almost insulting in that it carries an implication of "...but make it something not too hard, ok? Like, maybe we could paint your cubicle a different color, get you a bigger keyboard or change your phone extention so it spells out a cool acronym -- something like that."
Oh, sorry, was I ranting, again?
But seriously -- what the...???
Silver Bullet thinking doesn't just apply to this question; the folks who engage in it typically apply it to a myriad of situations, all of them, by definition, inappropriate. The classic example is trying to add more people in the mad scramble at the end of a project, but it wouldn't take much effort to think of twenty others.
I often make the analogy of using a cash-advance from one's MasterCard to pay one's Visa bill, and vice versa. While it's crazy, of course, one can see the allure -- I mean, it gives the immediate appearance that one can "buy" all sorts of nice things that one really couldn't otherwise afford, and never have to "pay the piper", so to speak. What I don't get is how otherwise very-smart, very-together people can not see how this sort of behaviour is something to be avoided at all costs, used only in an extreme emergency, as it comes with a tremendous "next month's bill" overhead. Heh, well, I suppose I do get it -- because these otherwise smart and together people spend so much of their lives in a state of emergency that it has become their "normal routine" to apply weird, extreme, emergency procedures to just about everything they encounter.On the one hand, I suppose I kind of admire them -- I mean, it's a pretty impressive feat, when you consider how much fire these people can juggle, while standing on a barrel of gasoline, drenched in the stuff, themselves.
On the other hand... how do people live like that?!?! I guess I just don't get it, after all.
Which I suppose, in the end, is why I'm moving on: because I don't get it. It sometimes feels as if I grew up in one civilization, where we have our customary foods, greetings, rituals and taboos, and my job is filled with people who grew up in a different civilization, where their customary foods, greetings and rituals have a large overlap with my taboos, and many of their taboos are things that I consider important foundations of ethical behaviour.
"...Or something like that." But in nicer words, because I do like most of them. In a "dinner companion" sort of way...
P.S. Heh, this started as a discussion of some of the 10,000 paths to be avoided, but I guess I got distracted by personal current events. This topic is definitely a candidate for a "version-next", as described at the top of this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment