Post

It’s me! In every workplace other than LRR! I’m not actually hostile, I’m actually kind of conflict avoidant, I just don’t like doing stupid things because stupid people tell me to do them. But when you point out how they’re stupid/timewasters, even using your polite voice? You’re difficult!

Amen. My dad was an engineer for a clothing company. He said “we make shirts, not hours, so let’s pay people for shirts” and launched a pilot. Production was faster and the cost per shirt went down, but an executive said “nobody who works a factory floor should make that much money” and killed it.

My team had notifications set up to tell us when a certain threshold was hit on a server so we could take action before it becamea problem. Simple, common stuff. We log in to the server, spend about 30 seconds on the task, and then it was several weeks before the next one.

The first red flag from the new manager was to declare that those notifications were happening because we weren't proactive enough. He hounded me for pushing back until I just started nodding snd agreeing. I set up a new distribution list without him in it and switched it out.

He listened to the older white guy on the team (who he hired despite every interviewer saying no) who was often so confidently wrong that I would question reality now and again. It was hell. Then he was gone and the culture shifted. There was more flattening of the org.