It's Working

I spoke with my therapist today about my job history. Besides her ringing endorsement that I don't have Asperger's Syndrome, she was more than happy to listen to the parallels I drew between being grumpy and depressed as a teenager in public school and being grumpy and depressed at the Science Center.

Furthermore, I was a different kind of grumpy and depressed after I finally left that place in order to go secure a living wage.

I won't name names, but I was not surprised to find out last week that that place is still playing a lot of games with their engineers in order to try to wring every last bit of compliance out of them.

I wanted a work-life balance. Their answer was "You'll work for us for the rest of your life, and in return you'll have a nice bank balance." When I left, it was with a mixture of happiness (Freedom!) and sadness (ZOMFG, unfamiliar!) I wasn't really sure that work-life balance could be had without sacrificing a good deal of income.

Turns out, I'm pretty happy with where I am right now. There are no minimum work hour limits, no headgames with upper management trying to contractually bind my loyalty, and, perhaps most amazing of all, no incessant push to do all of everything on everyone's itinerary nownownow.

I realize only now that the breakneck pace of my old job was possible because it was a tiny, agile group of people who could all hear the orders barked once through a megaphone. Now, in an organization with a dozen different subgroups and floors upon floors of workers, only half of whom could even recognize each other by sight, you get that mixed blessing known as "bureaucracy". When your team is vast, opinions will always differ and misunderstandings aren't uncommon. In fact, they're the norm. You must go to extraordinary effort to make sure your point comes across correctly.

And in this cacophonous huddle of confusion, everyone understands that implementation of a decision, even a unanimous one, takes time. There's never a "drop everything, we all have to _____ before 5 o'clock" edict. Even the most critical of changes take about 24 hours to go through the deliberation and approval process. Hell, even the stuff that's on fire can usually wait until morning. People actually have an opportunity to catch their breath, recharge their batteries, and return to the fray with renewed energy. Astonishing!

It's a good place to be, occupationally speaking. Every time I throw my hands up in disgust at how long some simple change is taking to work its way through the system and through the change review board, whom I only half-jokingly call "the crotchety old men who look at every proposed change and overanalyze every one of them to death", I will at some point stop and think of the alternative.

When the team truly is agile, the good decisions get implemented immediately. And so do the bad ones. And there isn't any reliable kind of filter that can kick in to help figure out into which category any given judgment falls. So, amazingly, a little bureaucracy is a good thing. It keeps us from going full tilt at every windmill, and that saves a lot of wear and tear on the lance, the horse, and the rider.