I’ve done jobs I loved. I’ve been harassed, degraded, and threatened by bosses at each such job such that I suffered psychologically and eventually had to leave each job.
Bosses have gotten really bad for some reason. A manager used to mentor people and deal with communicating issues upwards. Now it seems to be entirely abusive supervision.
Bosses have gotten bad because the c-suite has metricized everything. Thirty years ago there was none of this constant NPS feedback or strongly agree/disagree surveys. You remember when the cashiers at fast food places started asking you to fill out those surveys and earn a free double whatever on your next visit? That was an executive making up one more number to justify their bloated salary at the expense of every employee beneath them in the hierarchy. These days it is all about the numbers, and the people who are best at making the numbers higher are fucking sociopaths who bring those numbers up by crushing the humanity out of people, so they float to the top like the megalomaniacal turds they are.
Ask yourself when the last time you had honest feedback directly from your boss, that wasn’t veiled in three layers of web forms and paper trails designed to make it impossible for you to get a raise for the good work you were doing. For me, it was five years ago, before the pandemic, when my boss advocated for me directly to her supervisor, cut right through the shit and told them, “if you do not pay him what he’s worth, we will lose him and this department will be underwater.” She didn’t need a meeting to tell me what my peers thought of my work and how it could be improved, like so many MBA managers who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to my skillset, we worked together and when I fucked up, she let me know and showed me how to fix it, because she knew how to do the job she was asking me to do.
She left because she got tired of dealing with the CEO, son of former CEO, who thought he could charisma his way through massive failures to our partners and clients because of his incompetent leadership. He decided that the reason it didn’t work was because the crew didn’t read enough Patrick Lencioni new age management books, so we all got to read about the fucking Fantasyland workplace where everyone who aligns to the metrics he pulled out of his ass gets to go to corporate blowjob heaven, and also every hug between two men has to be underscored “100% NOT GAY.”
I think you are correct. My first bad boss was a contractor for Comcast. Layers and layers of metrics and KPIs. My best CEO was a “my door is always open, come in and talk” guy.
I fucking detest “data driven business”. I’ve written a few rants on it on Lemmy, having been at one point called in to fix egregiously idiotic examples of how eg. KPIs can be defined so badly and calculated so wrong that they don’t mean anything, like literally reading goat guts to determine how the service was doing would have given results exactly as close to reality as those KPIs (if not more.)
The vast majority of “data driven business” and “business intelligence” (the practitioners of which are somehow never fucking intelligent) stuff is just numerology but for MBAs.
I’ve done jobs I loved. I’ve been harassed, degraded, and threatened by bosses at each such job such that I suffered psychologically and eventually had to leave each job.
Bosses have gotten really bad for some reason. A manager used to mentor people and deal with communicating issues upwards. Now it seems to be entirely abusive supervision.
Bosses have gotten bad because the c-suite has metricized everything. Thirty years ago there was none of this constant NPS feedback or strongly agree/disagree surveys. You remember when the cashiers at fast food places started asking you to fill out those surveys and earn a free double whatever on your next visit? That was an executive making up one more number to justify their bloated salary at the expense of every employee beneath them in the hierarchy. These days it is all about the numbers, and the people who are best at making the numbers higher are fucking sociopaths who bring those numbers up by crushing the humanity out of people, so they float to the top like the megalomaniacal turds they are.
Ask yourself when the last time you had honest feedback directly from your boss, that wasn’t veiled in three layers of web forms and paper trails designed to make it impossible for you to get a raise for the good work you were doing. For me, it was five years ago, before the pandemic, when my boss advocated for me directly to her supervisor, cut right through the shit and told them, “if you do not pay him what he’s worth, we will lose him and this department will be underwater.” She didn’t need a meeting to tell me what my peers thought of my work and how it could be improved, like so many MBA managers who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to my skillset, we worked together and when I fucked up, she let me know and showed me how to fix it, because she knew how to do the job she was asking me to do.
She left because she got tired of dealing with the CEO, son of former CEO, who thought he could charisma his way through massive failures to our partners and clients because of his incompetent leadership. He decided that the reason it didn’t work was because the crew didn’t read enough Patrick Lencioni new age management books, so we all got to read about the fucking Fantasyland workplace where everyone who aligns to the metrics he pulled out of his ass gets to go to corporate blowjob heaven, and also every hug between two men has to be underscored “100% NOT GAY.”
I think you are correct. My first bad boss was a contractor for Comcast. Layers and layers of metrics and KPIs. My best CEO was a “my door is always open, come in and talk” guy.
I fucking detest “data driven business”. I’ve written a few rants on it on Lemmy, having been at one point called in to fix egregiously idiotic examples of how eg. KPIs can be defined so badly and calculated so wrong that they don’t mean anything, like literally reading goat guts to determine how the service was doing would have given results exactly as close to reality as those KPIs (if not more.)
The vast majority of “data driven business” and “business intelligence” (the practitioners of which are somehow never fucking intelligent) stuff is just numerology but for MBAs.
I’m sorry to hear that. I guess I just need to remember to be thankful