Among my many horrible failings is the fact that I can neither produce nor consume Management. I have only the usual problems with giving or following -- with the exception of RTFMing -- instructions that make sense (to me), but I am just not able to participate in motivational gymnastics. I have no Command Presence and react negatively to Team Building Exercises.
This has repeatedly impacted my ability to work and play well with others. Every tech-company for which I worked claimed to have "dual track career ladders" such that one could rise to an equivalent prestige and salary in either Engineering or Management. But that was HR Theory 101. In Reality 2 one had to be a "team leader" or some other such nonsense and eventually became mired in playing corporate politics. Given my Command and Team failings this invariably led to my experiencing the one-true-emotion: Frustration.
Even now, self-exiled from that corporate world, I suffer from being Differently Managed and generally have to keep to myself. It has taken some years for me to come to understand a key fact about that world which explains quite a bit of my misery: I was working from a completely different business plan than that of upper management. I thought that we were all there to make products that would make our customers lives, or at least their businesses, work better. However we were just necessary cogs in the real plan, which was to make The Company look valuable so it could be sold (or IPOed, or cashed out somehow) thus profiting the original investors. This small, startling, detail explains so many seemingly stupid decisions made during my tenure in that other world that it is almost unfathomable that it took me so long to grasp the thread. It also -- to my simplistic mind -- explains much about the American Economy as it stands today.
Anyway, before I got the big picture I wrote a novella about my End Days which insomniacs may find useful: The Company.
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