As a senior member of the technical staff at my company I am involved in a lot of the churn surrounding the work we do. I participate in identifying technologies and creating solutions that not only work, but solve the problem we are trying to solve. However, at my place of employment, the biggest problem is not with the work we are doing, but how our lack of a positive culture has created an environment of absolute apathy.
Let me explain. Several months ago, I was told I would be working with a different development group for the next year. Unfortunately, I wasn't involved in this decision making process. Instead, the decision was made for me. I explained that I wasn't happy with the decision, but she told me there wasn't anything that she could do about it. I thought to myself, was there really was nothing she could do about it or did she not even want to try.
After taking some time to think about it I decided that I would try to make the best of it. I explained that I would accept the position, but that I didn't want a change in title or responsibility and that I saw my role as a technical liaison to the new department. My supervisor, Megan, agreed that that should be my role, but that I should talk to the manager, Steve, who was leading the effort. This is where things took a turn for the worse.
The first several weeks were a lot of fun as we were trying to size the effort for the next year. What I found, is Steve would make blanket statements and dare his direct reports to challenge him on it. Each time, people wouldn't challenge him, not because they agreed with him but because they were afraid of his authority. Lucky for me, I saw my role was to challenge things that were either technically not feasible, not planned well, or could be done in a better way. I found the teams were often very receptive to me challenging things that needed to be challenged. Steve was forced to listen as we had strength in numbers.
It was after these public forums, that the deception really began. I watched him pull aside individuals one-to-one. Effectively cornering them in order to get something changed that he wanted. I understand that the work place is not a democracy, but this political move and power play, while it may have gotten the short term result that he wanted, was also poisoning the workplace culture. Unfortunately, I was relatively powerless to stop it. At the end of the day, the amount of work they wanted would have taken about 18-24 months of development, not the 12 months they wanted it to be. We compromised at 13 months and some de-scope of the original work.
The next disaster with Steve came when the development work was to begin. In a one-to-one meeting with him, I explained that I saw my role as helping with the overall direction of the technical solutions that were being created. Basically being a mentor to the 5-6 new employees that we were hiring throughout the first phase of the project and doing code reviews and generally helping people with the direction of the project and how to effectively refactor the code base to meet our goals. I explained that this role was important to a successful project, but that it would also limit the amount of coding that I would be able to do. I still planned on working on some of the core components but would probably stay out of most of the feature work.
Sadly, this manager didn't see the value in what I was proposing. Instead, his decree was that I would be relegated to the role of coder only. Once again, Steve proved that his management style was to leverage his authority. Not only did he lack leadership but he also proved out of touch with how software development actually worked. Needless to say I was pissed. I didn't think this was right and I took it back to my supervisor, Megan. But much to my chagrin, she rebuffed me with there was nothing that she could do again. Ignorance and apathy, what was I doing here.
I talked to some of my co-workers and asked for advice on how to handle the situation. Almost universally I received the same advice, "Quit caring. Do the bare minimum, collect your pay check and go home." It was the defining moment of the Culture of Apathy.
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