Once upon a time I had some trust and pride in this company. No more.
Management at my site are running scared, desperately looking for the right butt to kiss, even more hopelessly risk averse than ever and clearly more preoccupied with their own futures than actually running the company.
The decline has been coming for a long time.
Instead of innovating, just move the jobs overseas. Instead of motivating with incentives, use fear.
Spending a fortune supporting applications and 10K servers? Move the work overseas. Btw, applications running on servers is not the way modern IT organizations work. There are much more efficient ways to run systems. Yes, we are doing the wrong thing, but cheaply.
Audits are a us versus them game. Projects are a blizzard of paperwork and checklists. Nobody cares about the quality of what we are doing, just making sure the PowerPoint is perfect and the checklists are ticked. Decisions that could be made in five minutes take project managers months of PowerPoint and reviews to make. Decisions are signed off by dozens of stakeholders to avoid any individual accountability.
Debate and discussion is stifled and suppressed. Don't point out that things could be done more efficiently or else you will be labelled as non-constructive.
Staff leave and join the group without notice.
Hard work doesn't merit even a lunch as recognition.
No money for anything, unless it involves flying the leadership team overseas for a boondoggle to discuss collaboration, whose only result is a blizzard of slogans and emails and websites.
Staff on overseas remote teams not collaborating well? Fly the managers overseas for a working holiday so they can talk about how to get the worker bees to collaborate with people they have never met.
The entire org chart is full of people whose titles indicate they are managing or advising or supervising something. Can't find any workers.
Avoid making decisions at any cost. Always insulate yourself by getting all the stakeholders to agree so no one person can be held responsible. A wrong decision will be punished. Waste from not making a decision is just fine.
Enormous resources are devoted to creating internal marketing websites telling everyone how important we are.
Busywork is the name of the game. Walk around and you will see 90% of the staff are in Outlook, Yammer or PowerPoint.
The more email you send, the higher your profile is and the more likely you are to be moved up.
EMIT reworked their list of skills and finally (this is 2020) introduced the role of a programmer. Imagine, a programmer in EMIT. I guess everyone else is coordinating with each other.
Rapidly move people around so nobody ever becomes good at what they do. Then bemoan our lack of productivity. The few people who manage to specialize, treat them with open disdain as not having leadership potential.
Leaders proudly proclaim they are not technical and "moved beyond that" after their first assignment.
Employees know that management have no knowledge of what is actually going on, so they do whatever they hell they want. Managers laud minor achievements and ignore major efforts.
Fill the leadership ranks with conformers and people who agree with each other. Then bemoan the resulting tunnel vision and lack of perspectives.
Leaders are obsessed with paperwork and process and trivia while the products we roll out are engineered with duct tape and glue.
We have exhaustive standards and rules for paperwork. We have principles. But detailed engineering standards do not exist. Quality is a joke.
I have not seen the manager at my site for years. We moved to open concept offices for "collaboration and sharing" and immediately the managers moved to a hidden ghetto in the corner from where they rarely emerge.
We adopted Agile, and promptly found a way to have more management roles than workers. Our version of Agile created a lot of meetings that the do nothings can attend and a vast trove of data for generating charts that illustrate "progress".
The only time you will ever meet senior management is if you accidentally swipe your corporate card at Starbucks and they have to reprimand you.
Talk a big story about business practices and honesty. Make fancy videos.
Downsizing? Game the ranking system, falsely say people are poor performers and push out perfectly capable people without fair compensation in the midst of a pandemic.
Employees see the entire system is corrupt and only care about doing what serves them.
The Exxon sign light is dim and swarmed with insects. I would not recommend this company to my kids - oh, check that, my kids openly scoff at the place. Their business school lesson on Exxon is sandwiched between discussions on Enron and GE.