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managerial laziness
Thursday, October 26 2000
Yesterday I was overwhelmed to the point of despair by the reality of my managerial role. I didn't want the responsibility of having to tell someone to do work that might in the end prove unnecessary. Today, though, that attitude turned around completely. By the time I got to work I had a list of things for the contractor dude to do, and after I gave him his task list (in the impersonal form of an email), I realized I didn't have anything pressing that I needed to do. I had effectively delegated some not-especially-exciting research tasks and was free to do nothing at all! This was great, because nothing (or something close to it) is precisely what I'd been doing since the re-org began. This lack of things to do, I realized, this privilege of management, could easily get to be addictive. If all I have to do is root around and find things that need to be done and assign people the task of doing them, I don't think I'll have much trouble in this role. But of course, at some point, as the things that need doing become more apparent, I'm sure I'll start actually doing them. For now, though, I'm just skating along. I have succeeded in becoming a Corporate Master. Hear me roar!
Still, given my responsibilities, my salary just isn't on the par with what I should be earning. And beyond that ever-important factor, at my core I'm not especially happy doing this sort of work. Ever since Linda's farewell lunch yesterday (attended by fired colleague Kolja), I've felt a strong desire to either seek new prospects or have that seeking involuntarily imposed upon me. In the aftermath of his firing, Kolja ended up with at least a thousand extra dollars in his pocket as well as a pay raise. This is on account of his receiving two weeks severance along with all his accumulated vacation time. But his actual vacation wasn't long; within three days he was gobbled up by another local dot com less than a mile from my house. If I had my druthers, I'd also be laid off, receive severance pay and vacation time, and go get myself a job with income high enough to actually buy things. But for someone with programming talents (especially at my salary), it's not easy to get fired. The only thing I can get canned for is my online journal, but I'm not saying anything sufficiently bad about my workplace or anyone working there. I'm like every other fangless schmuck with an online journal, except I freely admit guilt to charges of masturbation and defecation.
After a day of test-taking the results are in, more or less. If you're interested how people compared to me in theSpark.com's personality test, you can see a snapshot of my results here.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?001026 feedback
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