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Subject:RE: When you hear the Axe in the dark... From:"Tariel, Lauren R" <lt34 -at- saclink -dot- csus -dot- edu> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:02:22 -0800
Gene,
"Do you *prefer* working for yes man slavedriver tech pubs managers who happily lay all of the company's planning errors on your shoulders?"
No. So I'm a contractor. I have never met a manager that could handle workload increases very well. I've worked with nervous people who worry about job cuts and push their people (and blame them for errors) to work harder in an attempt to avoid lay-offs and business closures. I've been laid off from 4 of my 6 full-time jobs. The other two were when I was young and I left for better work. I work as a contractor because there is more security for me in knowing that my job is temporary than there would be in thinking that I might have a long-term position and then being shocked by a lay-off. Lay-offs are too emotional for me, so I am really not interested in working full-time for a company again.
For the rhetoric side of things, I know that there are positive interpretations of the word, but I was looking for an appropriate word to describe what I read in your points. By "rhetoric," I attempted to describe the vanilla, "can be applied to any situation," and "doesn't really say anything that can encourage controversy or conflict" comments.
I don't think that is disagreeable to want to come into a position as someone that just wants to go with the flow and always have that flow be steady and predictable. I really didn't know if that is how you wanted to sound or if you were trying to make a profound comment. You sounded very benign aside from the part about leaving if management became unsupportive. I'm sure that employers would want to hire you. You sound very non-threatening to management and I imagine that managers would not need to concern themselves with the thought that you might try to steal their jobs. So you probably do get a lot of offers for full-time, regular employment because you sound like you want to "fit in" to the flow and not try to "improve" the process.
Now you do show that you have some willingness to communicate to management that they are pushing too hard and this can be a good a quality because you will help management avoid making a faux pas of overestimating resources and you sound like you will never change management's way of doing things. Since I don't know if this is how you want to sound, I don't know you find my perceptions derogatory. I know that for myself, I would not want to be described as somebody that will "fit-in."
The corporate world tends to look dysfunctional to me. People race through their mornings like lemmings in a fire, work through lunch, become very catatonic in the afternoons, and work long hours because of "deadlines," although those deadlines would be a non-sequiter with good planning. I could never work like that and would much less want to fit in with this type of world. As a contractor, I get paid for every hour that I work and companies do not like to pay for extra hours. So no overtime for me. I also will not rush for an avoidable deadline. Somebody else's mis-management is not my problem, unless I have been contracted and compensated to fix that problem.
Lauren
________________________________
From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr -at- genek -dot- com]
Sent: Wed 1/24/2007 11:59 PM
To: Lauren; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: When you hear the Axe in the dark...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lauren" <lt34 -at- csus -dot- edu>
> What corporate discipline does not require "reaching a balance between goals
> and resources and the willingness to adjust both when needed"?
None, but that doesn't stop some corporate types from coming up with
unrealistic goals and not providing the resources to achieve them, does it?
> I really do not want to come off sounding derogatory, I might sound a little
> harsh because it's late and I am in the middle of doing my taxes, but points
> 1 and 2 sound a little like rhetoric to me. These comments can be applied
> to many situations and not just documentation.
To a certain extent they are rhetoric, to be sure. But if you have a
dictionary, look up the definitions of "rhetoric," not all of them are
necessarily bad.
> What I get from reading this is a sense of someone who will not make waves,
> who will accept management decisions without question, who wants just enough
> support to maintain a middle of the road position, and who will probably
> shun an intense increase in workload (or leave the company because of it)
> like what often occurs after management fails to properly budget its
> resources. The last point of "having these conversations with the
> management of some other company" in the event of a lack of management
> support sounds threatening and almost inviting the axe.
Depending on what you mean by "not make waves," yes. I'm not of a
mind to do battle with management as an "advocate for the user" to
convince them we should do more documentation than they want,
especially if I know they aren't going to commit to the effort
necessary to do it. If they tell me what they want, I'll tell them
what it's going to take to get it; if they tell me what they can commit
to in resources, I'll tell them what they can get for it.
If management "fails to properly budget its resources" and the
result is "an intense increase in workload" I'm not going to just roll
over like a good yes man and tell staff to smile, be good worker
bees and plan on sleeping in the office til its done. I'll push back to
make the necessary adjustments to goals so that they're achievable
without working staff to death and push for changes in planning so
that it won't happen again. And if it becomes clear to me that it is
going to happen again because the company isn't learning from its
mistakes and isn't taking my input seriously, I probably will be
leaving.
So what exactly did you find disagreeable about that? Do you
*prefer* working for yes man slavedriver tech pubs managers
who happily lay all of the company's planning errors on your
shoulders?
Oh, and BTW, the people I had these conversations with? They
hired me.
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