Warm Body Syndrome

One of the things that I find the most amazing (or maybe hideously disgusting) at the Shitshow is what I like to call Warm Body Syndrome (WBS).

When I was bright eyed and optimistic about my new career at the Shitshow I used to think my hard work and strong performance would pay off and eventually lead me to become a manager, lead engineer, or senior engineer......once again, I was wrong. Promotions at the Shitshow have little to do with merit based performance and more to do with Seniority or Warm Body Syndrome. For all of you reading and wondering what this mysterious Syndrome may be, don’t worry, I will explain. When an opening for a lead engineer, manager, etc. becomes available the functional managers have a "meeting of the minds" and decide what Shitshow engineer should take this new role. Well, they don’t think of the best person suited to successfully execute this role or the person who has the correct experience for that position, oh no, that would make too much sense. They merely look at an organizational chart and see who currently isn’t assigned to a program and go from there. This is how new hires become leads on projects and completely incompetent people become managers and senior engineers.

Let me clearly illustrate this point with an example. Let's say Employee A decides to take a 3 week vacation. When Employee A comes back to work at the Shitshow, it is then functional management's job to find work for Employee A. Instead of maybe shuffling people around on projects, they simply say "oh hey, we need a lead engineer for XYZ and Employee A needs work" and the next thing you know Employee A is instantly promoted. In my years at the Shitshow I have seen the following:

- A lead engineer have absolutely no clue of basic engineering principles for the project she was working on
- Managers who have no people or organization skills
- Senior Electronic Engineers not know how to use an oscilloscope
- Software engineers who are tasked to program in languages they are not familiar with
- Mad scientist engineers put into positions of cost and schedule management

As you may well know, the above outlined situations never end well. All of these brilliant functional management decisions lead to cost and schedule overruns on every single program I have ever worked on and low employee morale which causes the good employees to want to leave the company for greener pastures. But hey guess what? If you mix all of these ingredients together, you get a Shitshow!

Because my hard work goes unrecognized and promotions are based on Warm Body Syndrome, I throw rocks.