Where I work
I love almost all the people I work with, so I have to question what went wrong. When I started with my current employer, I was young and eager, but lately work is best summed up by this post. It’s not so much that my job sucks, but that the overall atmosphere is mediocre. I could be mediocre anywhere, but I would rather excel at a job that I like. I want to challenge and be challenged, not flattened out into some compromised shapeless mass of a “resource”. I want to work at the equivalent of a hometown grocer and cater to the customer, not become a faceless chain, which it feels like my employer is becoming.
People aren’t the cause, the way organizations are structured is most likely at fault. We distribute power in organizations hierarchically, and we enforce that structure of power, even though human beings are suited to working in tribal structures by nature. Authority and responsibility are usually divorced, and work is broken up into functional pieces and distributed among several departments, each of which reports to a different part of the organization. The work is not divided into parts by those responsible for doing the work, and the parts are assigned, not volunteered for. If the work is not broken up among departments, you may still need multiple departments to sign off on or do work on your behalf to move your project along.
So no one really has the power to do anything, and it becomes a social nightmare trying to get projects completed.
The atmosphere is mediocre probably because the pace is too slow. The barriers to getting anything done are way too high, they tend to require too much unnecessary interaction and so people just don’t bother.
yo I’m the first visitor
…i guess no one ever visits superbob.com XD