My vision of management and leadership comes from three places. One is the novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, in which Robert Fahmel is a consulting architect who staffs work out to three subordinates and has them check each other. His secretary only sees him work when there is a discrepancy, at which point she realized he really does know what he’s doing as he sorts out the problem himself with pencils and slide rule. The second is the novel (very much notthe movie) Starship Troopers, in which you’re not eligible for officer school until you have served as an enlisted trooper for some time and your higher-ups think you show the aptitude; the notion of training someone for management who hasn’t actually done the job is anathema. And the third is my own experience these last twenty-three years, where sometimes I’ve had a manager who did the job themselves and sometimes I didn’t. And there’s a distinct difference.
Last year, we were functionally outsourced. We still do the exact same job supporting the exact same people, but our paycheck comes from a different organization with reduced benefits and (based on the last 365 days) precious little interest in our actual jobs. Our management doesn’t much care whether we live or die, to all appearances; it’s been literally months since I heard from my boss’s boss and we are an afterthought at all-hands meetings of the new org. We still have to use the tools and resources of the organization we support but are not employed by, and as a result, we have no one in our line of command willing and able to make decisions on our behalf.
It was not substantially better before, if we’re being honest. I’ve been answering the same phone and email for almost twelve years now, and in that time, not one person at my level has ever been promoted into a management role. Hell, before the back end of 2015, no one had ever been promoted, period. If you were Tier 2 support, that was the end of the road until they belatedly created Tier 3 and lead positions. But at the same time, they brought in all-new managers across the org chart, none of whom were internal hires. The collected effect has been to convey the message that “what you do is not important, and your work is worthy of neither recognition nor reward.”
This is partly because of the paucity of leadership and vision that’s endemic to this particular setting in the first place. But I think part of it also stems from the cult of the MBA – that you can teach management abstracted in every particular from who and what you’re managing – and from the notion that if you haven’t changed jobs every two years in this godforsaken Valley, you’re an indolent layabout without the drive and initiative to hop at the next opportunity. I don’t know what was more harmful last time I went on the job market, a college graduation in the 1990s or five years with the same company when I handed out resumes.
Problem is, sometimes you need leadership that came up through the hawser hole. You need those senior non-coms who have experience in your environment and institutional memory and know the ins and outs of how things work. The idea that the only role for the crafty veteran is to be retired and big-dicking around as a VC is why Silly Con Valley is a tech-washed Wall Street now; the money thinks it’s actually smarter than the brains now. And it probably goes a long way toward explain the cult of freedom from accountability espoused by Elon Musk and Paul Graham and Peter Thiel and the rest of the Hitler Youth at Y Combinator. Beware the man who only knows one thing and claims it’s the only thing worth knowing.
That’s why the 21st century has consisted mostly of vaporware and gaslighting. People sell promises and idiots buy, which is how morons like SoftBank can fund bullshit pyramid schemes like WeWork and Uber and Theranos that have no pathway to profitability. Companies like Lyft and Grubhub and Doordash complain about legal efforts to strengthen protections for gig workers while their long-term plans rely entirely on self-driving automation. And really, automation of everything is inevitable, because we’ve run out of places to which we can ship the labor. As humans come to demand a living wage, even in Shenzen and Dacca and who knows where else, the alternative is to mechanize and automate. If you don’t believe me, look at curbside delivery during the pandemic, ordered on your phone, and think how many waiters and cashiers are surplus to requirement even before you use the touch screen at McDonald’s or the self-checkout at Safeway.
These fuckers will legislate and agitate to pay you $2.13 an hour plus tips, pocket the tips, and then look you straight in the eye and say they’re fighting for your freedom. If the last four years hasn’t convinced you the extent to which people will gladly bullshit you about their misdeeds as they are in the process of committing them, then I can’t help you. We’re doomed as a society until we can make the cost of bullshit too great to pay for the bullshitters, instead of for us.