There are few things more heartwarming than walking a flabbergasted executive through the bureaucracy firewall that he's immune to and seeing his or her reaction.
I've lost count of the directors who've blown a fuse at my desk trying to disprove my "exaggerations" about the difficulty of ordering a part that "shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, tops". After spending two hours with me at my desk seeing the process that rank and file employees have to deal with, rather than the streamlined version executives have, they are usually ready to kill someone.
At one company, it was perfectly normal to come back from lunch and find a package at your desk that had been ordered by a previous occupant of your location years earlier.
Each successful company must have this immune system. :-)
Story of my (work) life!
As the old maxim goes, don't tell, show.
There are few things more heartwarming than walking a flabbergasted executive through the bureaucracy firewall that he's immune to and seeing his or her reaction.
I've lost count of the directors who've blown a fuse at my desk trying to disprove my "exaggerations" about the difficulty of ordering a part that "shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, tops". After spending two hours with me at my desk seeing the process that rank and file employees have to deal with, rather than the streamlined version executives have, they are usually ready to kill someone.
At one company, it was perfectly normal to come back from lunch and find a package at your desk that had been ordered by a previous occupant of your location years earlier.
Work for a government contractor, there are at least three more layers to that process. And when change does come, it makes things abysmally worse.
This is so quintessential
The cure is worse than… Oh, never mind. The only cure is to leave, so I did.
The worst part is as as a developer when you decide to be helpful and just change the button color.