Some days I hate my job. Some days I hate my job more. And the reason for it all is that I am a software developer who works in "Corporate IT." There are worse jobs than this, to be sure. For example, I could be the Poopsmith, and that would be bad. But there are days, and today was assuredly one, where I think my job is worse than that.
When you work in any large organization, there are lots of different ways in which your job can suck. Probably everyone who watches TV has seen one of the commercials where a frightened-looking dude in shirt sleeves and a tie sits in the middle of cube farm surrounded by chimpanzees, who are forcibly dismantling the office furnishings. Or maybe you've seen the slightly more updated variation on the theme where the cube farm is abandoned for a jungle but instead of having real monkeys the cast is all human and just acting like monkeys. What are we supposed to draw from this? Personally, I think it just means that a jungle set and a boatload of starving actor-wannabes is cheaper than an animal trainer and a half dozen chimps. But what we're supposed to think is that we are all the productive and intelligent and sane ones, and our co-workers would be at a disadvantage if put up against lesser apes.
That's not my problem. I like the people I work with. There's probably about twenty of them and none of them are miserably incompetent. In my experience, that's not just rare, it's completely unprecedented. So... if not that, then what?
Well, there's management. Something happens to you when you become a manager. You stop worrying about productivity and you start worrying about the psychology of productivity. I'm not saying this is entirely bad. To a degree, that's the manager's job. Ostensibly, in order for you to become a manager, someone had to have seen in you some capacity for leadership. And part of being a good leader is being able to motivate the people you lead. If there's any justification at all for management making boatloads more money than the peons, then it's this. Once they've started paying you your manager money, if you're any kind of a decent leader then they get the motivation part for free.
Unfortunately, leadership is a profoundly delicate art. Knowing how to motivate a diverse group of people in significant numbers, though a talent I'm sure we'd all like to have, is the next closest thing to impossible after shagging your whole high school cheer squad. So what happens? Managers overthink it and completely fark it up.
This is what happened recently at my place of work: We were all working in digs that we seemed to like pretty well. The building was nice and new, our cube farm had a nice view. We were used to the space and worked well within it. But apparently the rent was too high. So we moved one building down, across the street. This building was built in the Seventies and was referred to by its previous occupants as "the ashtray." I'm not sure if this was because of the way it smelled or the fact that the lobby decor strongly resembles one of those faux-marble resin ashtrays that could be found in just about any den in every suburban rambler built in the Seventies. (I've always been partial to that amber bubbled glass.) Anyway, "the ashtray" pretty much conveys the right impression. The building sucks. But that's not what went wrong.
In our old digs, the nice digs, we had half-height cubes. Now, from the perspective of the developers, this is not ideal. Developers like a measure of privacy. We like to have a quiet space to exercise the rigorous mental discipline necessary for the practice of software engineering. We also like to play WoW and masturbate to pr0n, and low cube walls are conducive to none of these. But most of the people on the team are not developers. They are very close-knit and work well together, and their work style is very collaborative, which are desirable and productive traits.
So, when it turned out that the new, not nice digs had high cube walls, and a claustrophobic atmosphere this was deemed unacceptable. People just wouldn't be able to work. Of course, buying a whole new cube farm with low cube walls wasn't an option. That would erase all of the cost savings of moving to the cheaper building across the street. So what does management do? Just remove the cube walls entirely. That's right. High cube walls are bad, so no cube walls are obviously better. To be fair, there are some cube walls. The cube desks won't stand up without them. But mostly it's wide open space. Now the developers aren't the only ones pissed.
Some days, I would give anything for a big pile of shit and a shovel, or just a bunch of monkeys.
