Good god, there is not enough coffee in the world to make me look not hung over. Not that I am...but 4 hours of sleep is making my bloodshot, baggy eyes look really scary. I hope I don't make any children cry today. It's weird how when I am super tired in the morning and I have to get ready for work, time keeps jumping ahead. Every time I look at the clock it is 20 minutes later.
The company I work for is pretty hardcore about the corporate culture, and most of the people buy into it wholesale. Someone I know started working here not that long ago. Two weeks in, one of her new coworkers wrote her a letter detailing all the ways they appreciated her. She asked me if they were making fun of her, but sadly they were not. In unrelated news, I came across this mental midget on OkCupid last night
One of the reasons I wanted to work for small businesses is to avoid that weird corporate bullshit. If you asked the leaders of my employer today about a rally they'd all say "what the fuck?" We have our Christmas parties at a bowling alley/bar. The company is growing very rapidly but I can walk into the CEOs office and still be myself. My girlfriend wants me to go to a college gymnastics meet with her today. At first I thought it would suck but then, no, she reminded me it is in fact women's gymnastics and she would sneak drinks in too. Huh. Know what? I actually think I can handle that.
Went to the grocery store to pick up my prescription box of allergy needles, two cases of beer, six bottles of wine (buy six get 10% off)... and a bulk pack of condoms. I got some weird looks. Thought about throwing in one of those trash magazines with cosby on the cover just to make it extra awkward.
If you really wanted to make it weird you should've bought some koolaid and benadryl to complete the set.
Im about as anti soulless corporate culture nonsense as you get. Im probably not as invaluable as our Mississippi friend though. The company I just quit was a small business but worked for a lot of huge Fortune 500 companies. The owner had come from a large company so she wanted the whole corporate culture. We didn't have pep rallies but we went from an easy going real world type environment to the soulless corporate style parodied in Office Space. She was an insane stickler for email communications to clients. If you didn't bend over backwards with insanely unnatural butt kissing speak in your emails you were getting chewed out. When she came in to the company she required everyone, including veteran project managers, emails be sent through her first for review before being forwarded to clients. One lady had worked there for 6 years, the best project manager we had, and had done hundreds of projects with these clients. I got chewed out once for an email I didn't even send. The daytime shift manager stayed late one day and sent a email requesting another recruiter's (who was also a client on other projects) recruiting information. We needed it as it was a project at our location and the other recruiter was just helping us fill seats for a study. Very routine information to ask for and receive in this situation. The owner was CC'd in and phoned my desk about half an hour later, after the day time supervisor left, and gave me the third degree for the insanely unprofessional email I had sent. Since I hadn't sent it I was at a loss as to what email she was referring to and befuddled by how viciously she was tearing me a new one. I expected the email to be filled with emitocons and internet slang. It went something like this, a single line: "Could you send us your recruit profile so we can confirm* your recruits?" Short, to the point, not as wildly unprofessional as I had thought it'd be when I actually read it. The owner then immediately sent a reply to the email to our staff and explained what was unprofessional. It was to go like this: "If it wouldn't be much trouble, could you please forward us your recruit profile? We will need it in our confirming process." I guess it was not cordial enough and it could have come off as "short" and demanding or some such nonsense. It was part of a facade of ass kissery not to offend clients in the slightest. The irony that she demanded insane levels of respect for the clients but would turn around and shit on her underlings did not get lost on me. More soulless corporate bullshit. *(confirm they know the location and time/date of study via phone, standard stuff in market research)
If someone started an email with "If it wouldn't be much trouble" I would assume they were being a passive aggressive cunt and ignore it on principle. My bosses require that you notify the team of any time you'll be out of office by scheduling a meeting in outlook and inviting everyone, all 28 of us. Nevermind that outlook provides three or four ways to handle this situation. It makes our calendars basically useless.
I am so glad I do what I do. I should never have to deal with this big corporate culture you guys are talking about. I would handle it about the same as Nett and Toytoy.
Being that 40% of daily communication between employees in my company consists of describing in great detail over a 2-way radio how they fucked their co-worker's mother last night, I think it's safe to say we don't have to deal with corporate culture here.
It's interesting, because most of the big projects I've worked on were for very large, multi-billion dollar companies. They'd gotten themselves into a technical hole so deep that it would require hard fucking work and some out-of-the-box thinking to get them dug out of it. That meant that for the early parts of my contract, I was untouchable... I'd be able to do or say just about anything because I was the new hired gun that was doing battlefield triage to get shit back on track, and more often than not, just putting together a plan and then working that plan, aggressively, was enough to keep management/HR at arms reach. A newly motivated team (sometimes over 60 developers), and tangible progress out of the mess they were in negated any bullshit/perceived workplace indiscretion that might occur. For instance, I actually had an HR person fired because she tried to force me to take the mandatory "don't rape your co-worker" training, which I refused to do, and she proceeded to withhold my paycheck. I then walked out, upper management freaked out, fired her, and apologized, and basically said "please, don't worry about that stuff, just keep doing what you're doing". The downside is that as you get closer and closer to the end result you're shooting for, the less they need you, and that "you're the only one who can save us" protection starts to fade. Add to that the fact that I'm usually burnt out from dealing with the corporate backstabbing and bullshit, and it's usually the time to bail and go find something else, and start the process all over again. That cycle is usually every 2 years, and has been for about the last 10 years in my career. It's a weird mix of loving and thriving in that technical cluster-fuck environment and the huge technical challenge of un-fucking things and hating big corporate bullshit. And there's a huge rush stepping in as the leader of a 40-60 person team who knows they're fucked, are depressed, and totally lacking in any morale, and then leading them to victory, and seeing and experiencing their excitement and pride in the accomplishment. This was so much the case when I did the Need For Speed stuff years ago, the underlying framework/engine that we created was internally named the Victory Engine. Same thing goes for the current gig I'm at... an old friend of mine is one of the co-founders, and he called and said, "I've invested in a company that is sinking... I need you to come and save it." 6 months in I was having issues with the CEO due to the drastic measures I was taking to deal with 2 years of technical debt that was going to kill the product, and there were rumours that he was going to can me because I wasn't being a "yes" man. The entire team stepped up and said, "if he goes, we ALL go". That's the ultimate job satisfaction to me, and I'm addicted to it.
I've neve worked corporate but I once figuredI could because I can zen out at a job that requires mindless stupid-work. I have plenty of friends who work corporate and I told one of them this. He asks me "What do you find most obnoxious in workplace environments?" I said "Nepotism and authority Napoleans." "Nope nope nope nope nope. Those two combine forces in this world, like Devastator."
You guys have worked in some toxic corporate environments. I've actually had somewhat of the opposite experience. Not that there isn't plenty of shit to deal with in corporate culture, but the worst environments I've worked in have been two small companies. One was a mom and pop shop where the owner was an alcoholic and the rest of the workers had been there a long time and refused to acknowledge that he was running the business into the ground with bad decisions. That's still the only place I've ever been fired from for supposedly closing early when in fact I was there 15 minutes past closing time. The second place had a group of people working there that had become such a self-congratulatory circle jerk over the years that new employees were almost inevitably driven away. I've got a fair amount of corporate culture at the place I'm working now, being nearly a billion dollar company, but the R&D leadership is really excellent and does an outstanding job of keeping their employees sheltered from anything negative.
I've only been out of college for 5 years now, but in the few jobs that I've had I've also had much better experiences in corporate environments. I'm the kind of person who prefers to have structure instead of having to take things as they come. I also had to deal with my supervisor (who was an idiot who would turn an answer to a simple question into a 10 minute spiel) face to face on a daily basis when I worked for a small company, but in the two bigger companies that I've worked for I didn't have to nearly as much. But I'm sure that everyone's experiences are different.
One thing to take into account is that I specialize in fixing really, really fucked up, large projects, so my exposure is only, for the most part, to fucked up environments. Very rarely have I run into a fucked up technical project that didn't involve totally fucked up management. Also, most AAA video game publishers are incredibly toxic and fucked up environments, and that is a lot of what I've done recently.
Yep. I don't quite have the same exposure to it that you obviously do but virtually every failed project I've dealt with has started with a failure in management. Interesting... Once upon a time I was pursuing a job with Epic Games because I thought it sounded like a ton of fun. I needed a job faster than the timeline they could provide, though, so I went with another offer. Sounds like I might have dodged a bullet?
Part of the problem is that big companies are more likely to hire dumb people, and they pick them for dumb reasons. Then they have to put all of these policies in place to try and squeeze any useful work out of the idiots. Eight people interviewed me for my current job. Only one of them had enough technical knowledge to be able to tell if I was just making shit up. I overheard him talking to our boss the other day about another interview they did. He was trying very hard to tell her that the guy was a fucking idiot, but he couldn't say it outright because she had already decided the guy was a "good fit."
Big video game companies seem to go through a life cycle, whereby they are started and run by technical game developers who are very passionate about making games, who then hire business types, who then get big investment, who then take them public, and before you know it, the original technical/gamer founders are retired or have moved on, and you have a company that is run by penny-pinching MBA's who now care more about quarterly revenue projections than game quality and who's job is to appease their shareholders. There's a reason EA has become a publisher who does nothing but buy game titles and then pump out new versions each year, whether it's EA Sports or Need For Speed or what have you. There's a reason that everything is tied to monetization, and pre-sales are the norm, and day-1 monster DLC is practically required. Look at all the failed monster games from this past year and you'll see that those failures are all tied to giving more of a shit about getting games out ASAP to make money or in time for Christmas rather than quality of experience for the user. Every. Time. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but they really are quite few and far between. To me, the sweet spot is that independent studio that gets their first crazy money infusion and get to make the game they want, as they want, before the MBA's and Board of Directors take control. It would be nice to run into a company that would be able to see the long view and not adjust everything to maximize that year's CEO bonus.
Blizzard and Bioware(I know it's part of EA) have generally done good work and continued to support their games after release.
The job I just left was a medical office run by MBA's who had no experience with running medical offices. It's an ortho office that does about 90% elective procedures. The other 10% were stuff from the emergency room. With elective procedures, you really need to cater to the patients and make them feel special. Unfortunately, our management was only interested in patient volumes, which are important, but doesn't mean shit if the patients aren't happy. It doesn't matter as much in the trauma clinic because those patients have to come in because they didn't have a choice in getting sent to the ER. So their patient satisfaction scores are in the toilet. My manager wanted us double and triple booking our doctors and getting as many people in as possible. But when 70 year old Ethel is being rushed in and out of the office for her knee replacements, she doesn't come to us because they made her feel like cattle who only got 5 minutes with the doctor. You try to explain how this policy doesn't work for us too well to the manager and he doesn't want to hear it. All he cares about is getting patients on the schedule. Meanwhile our survey scores have dropped 40 points and many of them don't even come back. I don't understand how this common sense is lost on them.
Tomorrow is my first Ashtanga class. I've taken Power Yoga for over 6 years, but I've always been intimidated by Ashtanga. I signed up for a 4-week course. I'm prepping by getting drunk.