The people described certainly have it far worse than I’ve ever had it or seen it up close. But it matches and resonates with my experiences enough that I do not think these were cherry-picked corporations or examples, at all, merely randomly picked examples of large corporations outside of tech, with things usually left implicit made explicit (and we have an entire section here on why things are so often left implicit, a major theme).
I definitely don’t think this is a parody or worst-case scenario. This is explicit content to be taken both seriously and literally.
I think the main reason I’ve never seen it this bad is that I’ve never worked in a system with this many layers of management—we’re talking about 25+ grades of manager and 6+ levels of hierarchy in these corporations. The model says that if you’re ‘on the line’, meaning you deal with object-level reality slash don’t manage anyone, you escape most of this. It’s when you manage people who manage people, and are in turn managed by others who are managed by others, that this sets in full blast.
Partly the problems described here are a function of scale and time, I think. They occur when it is hard to link a person’s actions to real world results, as in very large organizations and those that have grown more complex over time. This may explain people’s experiences that it is not like this <where I work>.
In the early days (1970s) in IT it was not really like this even in large corporations. And in small organizations it is usually not so much like this either, except to the extent that they are dependent on maze-type organizations.
Large slabs of the quotes above (I read it all) could be taken verbatim from numerous organizations I was involved with.
Reading this was one of those experiences where you suspected something, but still retained some shreds of hope that it wasn’t so. And now you know that it is so. The covd19 pandemic also produced a lot of those types of experiences for me.
The people described certainly have it far worse than I’ve ever had it or seen it up close. But it matches and resonates with my experiences enough that I do not think these were cherry-picked corporations or examples, at all, merely randomly picked examples of large corporations outside of tech, with things usually left implicit made explicit (and we have an entire section here on why things are so often left implicit, a major theme).
I definitely don’t think this is a parody or worst-case scenario. This is explicit content to be taken both seriously and literally.
I think the main reason I’ve never seen it this bad is that I’ve never worked in a system with this many layers of management—we’re talking about 25+ grades of manager and 6+ levels of hierarchy in these corporations. The model says that if you’re ‘on the line’, meaning you deal with object-level reality slash don’t manage anyone, you escape most of this. It’s when you manage people who manage people, and are in turn managed by others who are managed by others, that this sets in full blast.
Partly the problems described here are a function of scale and time, I think. They occur when it is hard to link a person’s actions to real world results, as in very large organizations and those that have grown more complex over time. This may explain people’s experiences that it is not like this <where I work>.
In the early days (1970s) in IT it was not really like this even in large corporations. And in small organizations it is usually not so much like this either, except to the extent that they are dependent on maze-type organizations.
Large slabs of the quotes above (I read it all) could be taken verbatim from numerous organizations I was involved with.
Reading this was one of those experiences where you suspected something, but still retained some shreds of hope that it wasn’t so. And now you know that it is so. The covd19 pandemic also produced a lot of those types of experiences for me.