Ran into a colleague who was hired same time I was nearly 20 years ago and I considered to be a friend. He has a higher potential than I do. I was so sad to hear the way he was talking. Total disdain for workers. I guess he has become management.
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@e8, So very well said!!! You've nailed how most of us technicians & analysts in Clinton feel. They aren't taking any of us because we're just "support staff". I wish them good luck with getting people with similar EM 10-30 years of experience holding down the fort down in Texas the way we do.
@bx Yeah, and that’s exactly the part leadership gets wrong when they denigrate operators as “support,” “button-pushers,” or people merely following established procedures. The people who are actually operationally successful are not succeeding because they obediently followed some pristine flowchart handed down by our legendary leadership architects. Instead they are dealing with outdated documentation, if any exists, contradictory instructions, tribal knowledge, undocumented dependencies, legacy chaos, broken ownership chains, and systems that evolved through twenty years of mergers, workarounds, and survival instincts. The operators who keep things functioning succeed because they’re adaptive, resourceful, technically curious, observant, creative under pressure, and capable of understanding nuance and complexity. They are constantly stitching together fragmented clues across teams, systems, logs, history, personalities, politics, and operational realities just to keep the wheels attached to the vehicle. These are the real geniuses. Meanwhile the strategic layer operates inside simplified theoretical models: clean boxes, perfect ownership charts, PowerPoint arrows, “streamlined workflows,” and governance diagrams designed for a frictionless fantasy environment that does not exist anywhere.
That’s the upside-down part.
The people closest to the real complexity are treated like replaceable support staff, while the people furthest from the complexity are often treated like hipo visionaries which in turn has created a strange Dunning-Kruger effect at scale where the people with the least operational understanding or care strut around with the highest confidence simplifying systems they do not actually understand.
First isn’t the money made in Houston? After that these cherry picked people have to bark the loudest and march in step to keep the charade going.
I’d suggest the root cause is early selection of winners and losers. Every manager believes they were elevated by their superior intellect and work ethic. The prime motivation of the chosen winners will always be to maximize the differentiation between themselves and the losers. If you’re making the oil flow and know the hows and the whys of our business, you’re denigrated as an individual contributor and your work is considered simply following established work processes. Don’t expect civility in a work culture where such an insurmountable gap exists between the plebs and the aristocracy.
He got picked and did their bidding. That's all it takes sell your soul and go over to the dark side.