“Why is this my problem?” is something I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.
Sometimes it’s because I’m not delegating enough. Things end up on my plate, I feel like I can’t put them on anyone else’s out of the people who report to me, and other people in the organization just aren’t going to do them. Even when I let it hit the floor for months, nobody notices. I’m still stuck doing it.
At my employer, it used to be that you could go to two one-hour meetings each week, and know everything that was going on. Now I have two fifteen-minute meetings every day, just to know what the people I work with are doing, so that we all have something to say at a scheduled 2 hour meeting that in practice is rarely longer than 30 minutes that nobody pays any attention to.
Because nobody pays attention to it, what ends up happening is that I’m the only person who actually knows anything, but nobody knows that I know everything, because they assume that this place works in reverse, because most big companies give their engineers the mushroom treatment. So, I invariably have to deal with a panicked conversation, telling me something I already know as if I don’t know it and aren’t paying attention to it. When really, I’m eye-balls deep in it, almost drowning. “Hey Joe, at the escalation meeting we’re talking about how there’s a bunch of quicksand that’s sucking your entire team down under.” Really, no shit? You going to toss me a life preserver, or what?
They only care about the revenue. Which, would actually be fine if that were the case. If revenue was all we really cared about, we would just do everything I want to do and shelve most of the rest of it. But that’s not what’s happening. I call them “they”, but every last one of them is different and are actually invested in their own vision of the future. Everyone’s here for one last score, a monument to their own greatness, a story that’s the capstone of their careers about how they turned this place around. They want that monument to be different things, but they can agree that:
- It’s their monument
- It will big a big success
- It’s the future
Nobody can actually articulate what this monument is or what the path to success is on it. But they always call it the future, and everything else is the past. Even when the past is the present, and keeps the monument being built. The monument in the cloud.
The monument is actually a giant pit in the ground, which is really a funnel into Jeff Bezos’ mouth.