Sorry, this will be a long rant, but feel free to stop reading whenever, read the last 2 lines and have a great day!
I am working for a corporation…
I am tired of insincerity, fakeness, corporate bullshit, KPIs, abbreviations, buzzwords and management speeches which mean nothing. Tired of lunchtimes and coffee chats where people occasionally say what they really think. But then they go back to work and keep the status quo. Tired of people ignoring emails and actively resisting request for help. Required internal trainings… no way personal growth looks like this, thats physically painful to click through useless videos, answer multiple choice shit and get another annoying email notification about completion. Official titles have very weak connection to the actual duties or persons' ability to make decisions on hisher assumed level.
Tired of bullshit work we are claiming we are doing. All end deliverables are powerpoints, all milestones are meetings. During standups everyone just says with whom they had a meeting last week and who's signature they still need.
Once work package is done, one shit is wrapped into another shit and it is thrown over the fence to the receiving department. Nobody cares what happens with this shit on the other side. Pretty sure, on the other side nobody unwraps it.
It is a company driven by products and manufacturing, but still technology and innovation is involved. But we never discuss technology, technology people work in silos and have no one to discuss what they are doing in details, so they end up doing everything exactly they way they did it before. Our slack, teams chats and whatever are dead silent, except for corporate stuff – like here are the last corporate event photos, was a cool party (no, it was not). Everything is done via email.
Tired of crazy skewed age and seniority distributions. I am almost the youngest in my dept and the youngest in all teams and projects I worked for. I am 30+. I have seen senior people doing work, which a student could do. Seen people senior by title, way above their skills level. Seen team leaders with 0 people skills. Seniority weakly correlates with talent or contribution, rather than with age. People work here 20-25-30 years – it is absolutely normal to have no idea about how different can it be, because they are so used and afraid of changes. How they keep it up? Ownership. People hoard responsibilities, stick to what they did and try not to share – then you are the expert, the owner of something. If you do not own some process, tool, team or some activity of exchanging money for working hours – you can't be taken seriously.
Tired of inefficiency, sluggishness, lack of investment in infrastructure and support. Does it bring money in? Is this required by some process? Is this part of someones KPI? No? Not interested. Everything is so hard to approve that better settle with the present state. Even better – go on vacation. If enough people are on vacation, then the rest naturally can start working at half pace. Then we switch. And then it is september again.
Tired of processes and imposed routines. Agile which every team does their own way. Do retrospectives and standups because thats how it should be and it is easier to just do it than fight that process. Just tell the same shit 5 standups in a row and during retrospective mention the great team spirit and all the support you feel. Didn't finish half of sprint-stories? No worries, we just move them to the next sprint. Want to adjust acceptance criteria? Thats fine. Project deadline missed by half a year and counting? What can we do, it is not our fault. Yes, technically not ours, but still, nobody escalates, nobody pushes. Because this happens all the time. It is understandable. this is just stuff, need to avoid conflict (by conflict it meant saying out loud what everyone understands).
I am tired of all this, but I haven't seen passion. Colleagues not interested in latest updates from their professional discipline, don't follow the news, don't share links. No interest in true personal growth, very few people caring about their project. Didn't meet a role model, didn't see a person who's role I would like to take, no position I would like to be in 5 years.
So, I was made redundant as part of a large restructuring. This is absolutely the best thing that happened to me since I joined. I am very happy, and become better every day.
Therefore a question, how fast corporations kill passion?