Re: It's Friday, I want to hear a funny IT, system i, computer Story.

I once had a boss, whose primary reason for being hired was that the CEO
liked to play golf with him.

This golf player boss told me that I had made a big mistake in spoiling the
work force, by demonstrating that if they asked for anything, they could
usually get results back in a day or two. He said there's an unofficial
rule in management. If anyone asks for ANYTHING, never make delivery in
under a week.

I thought he was just an odd man out, but later I had another boss who
downgraded me for doing work of too high a quality. He says that I should
NEVER deliver a better quality product than the customer asks for. If I did
everything quick & dirty, I would get more done. If the people want the
stuff fixed, then that's another request, for each fix.

He was totally opposed to my attitude that deliverables should be of a
quality that later needing to fix them would be an exception to the rule,
due to an accidental oversight. He thought EVERYTHING from the computer
dept should be flawed, so people would appreciate us more ... we would
always be fixing things, instead of working on enhancements.

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:17:45 -0400, Dan wrote

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oh man.... well.... ok. Here's the rest of that story. Shortly after
that my boss was fired and he was replaced as IT Director by a fellow
with one year experience with PCs, I was let go soon after that. The
one who did the job changes was fired soon after that.

But more to the one year experience... Prior to coming into this IT
Department as a minimum wage gopher (his "one year of experience"), he
had been a worker in a Marina where his nickname was "Captain Backwards"
because he had apparently inadvertently sailed a customer's yacht
backwards across the marina basin, causing a whole lot of damage.

Was this the company owner's nephew? Isn't this how totally
clueless people get hired as an IT Director? I mean, I've seen some
managers that you just knew were there only because of nepotism, but
that one takes the cake, Booth.

Oh, and so, to answer my earlier question, I'm guessing all you got before
you were let go was a nice attaboy.

I remember when I was working for a consulting company back in the
80's, they were one of IBM's largest business partners at the time,
and I was working at a branch that employed, IIRC, 50 people or so.
There was a large, nay, HUGE project that saw about 15 people
working on it. It suffered from a manager who didn't know how to
manage out-of-scope add-ons, and, before you knew it, they were
getting close to deadline with almost no hope of delivering anything
usable. Those 15 people (salaried, BTW) worked 80-hour weeks for
two months to get this thing cranked out and delivered on time. At
the following monthly branch office meeting, the branch manager
brought the 15 people forward to acknowledge their efforts and gave them
each an envelope which contained a "reward", as he put it, that they
could use towards "a nice dinner on the town". Man, if you've never
heard a pin drop... Someone eventually started that awkward
applause, you know, the kind that starts out slow, and then others
finally regain consciousness to join in. If that doesn't motivate
your workforce, I don't know what will!
(Yeah, motivate them to find a new job!)

- Dan
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