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“Like herding cats.” I’ve heard this out of the mouths of PMs and other management types. No shit that’s what it’s like because cats aren’t herd animals. It’s what happens when you put some of the smartest people in your company at the bottom of a hierarchy, and then have some doofus manage us that reads inspirational leadership blogposts all day.

We will undermine the shit out of your shit, and you won’t even know it’s happening.

We will make every single reprimand of yours into a joke while you’re not in the building. “Hey Joe, I’m pretty sure what you’re doing right now is spreading negativity. Don’t you know it’s contagious?”

We will game every single metric you try to use on us. We will game every single one of your leadership agendas.

When I think of these things, I laugh in my heart like Skeletor.

Comments
  • 4
    Well, yeah. It's hard to herd cats, but you can get them to go where you want pretty easily with the proper incentives.
    If they can't adapt to the behaviours of the citters your dealing with they really shouldn't be managing them.
  • 8
    I has fun killing a few bad bosses politically, but when upper management just replaces them with more of their ilk, I realized things would never change. Can't make a VP resign / get fired over office politics without being way too overt. 🙁

    So instead, I got my devs to make fun of everyone else involved, only follow the policies they must, and I would repeatedly remind upper management that their policies are silly and seriously hurt productivity. It made our corner of the work environment much friendlier, but ultimately didn't change anything. So most of us left.
  • 2
    My boss right now takes every bug report I submit for the legacy code I'm working on as some sort of hellish inferno b/c half the codebase is broken. It works because the only bug checking is the output, so the nondeterministic behavior waits in the shadows for a dev to make literally any change that uses the RNG and advances the sequence. When I say it needs to be fixed, I 'scare the financial people'. Well yeah they should be scared! Hire some competent contractors for goodness sakes!
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