An Abundance of Dunces

One thing that I love about the Shitshow is that when a program is growing, new layers of management are created so that inept managers can keep getting promoted. But when a program is shrinking, the level of managers stays about the same. Rather than simply fire the incompetent managers and keep the good ones, management creates several different strategies to keep themselves around.

Strategy #1: Promote yourself to some sort of sector level position, that way your job is not dependant on one program. There are clever ways to do this, just as long as you can attach yourself to a position where you can talk about things “at a sector level.” Even if you are just forwarding emails, now you are forwarding emails “at a sector level”

Strategy #2: Take on a dual role. Rather than just being a Functional Manager, offer to be Functional Manager/IPT Lead. You’re so good, you can do the work of two people!! In reality, taking on a dual role isn’t more work because Functional Managers don’t do anything anyway.

Strategy #3: Come up with a new process tool, then force everyone to use it. Once they do, you can make the argument that the new process tool is the most important, crucial element of the entire program. Without it, without you, we’d be lost. You can police everyone and make sure they are using the tool, make monthly progress reports on tool usage, notify people when the tool is down or being upgraded, etc. Get the tool implemented “at a sector level” and you’ve got it made!
Note: Make sure you don’t give any credit to the engineer who actually designed the tool and made it work, since all you know is how to check email on your Blackberry.

Out all of these strategies, you can only hope that your inept manager will take Strategy #1 because Strategy #2 and #3 will just create more work for the engineer. Obviously, Strategy #3 will create yet another useless process tool that will only take away time from the real work that the engineer needs to get done. With Strategy #2, the overburdened Manager/IPT Lead will delegate most of his work to the Lead, who will do it because they want to get promoted to IPT Lead. As a result, the Lead has no time to help the engineer or fill him in on anything. Thus, a lot of your work will be spinning wheels trying to figure out what to do exactly and why.

Because the best case scenario to get rid of an inept manager is to promote him, I throw rocks.