An HPE job can stimulate LOTS of diverse thoughts about LOTS of things, to include ethology (the study of human and animal behavioral mechanisms as biological adaptations) and anthropology and history (the next and higher levels of evolution in humans; AKA, “culture” and “civilization”). I’ve summarized my findings below; I hope that they are helpful. Sad to say, honest reporting precludes saying that “everything is coming up roses”. This is from the particularly bleak perspective of an employee of a workplace that deliberately fosters a dog-eat-dog work ethic, via constant layoffs, as driven by “metrics” of your rankings, as judged by clueless managers.
If you have the patience to sit still long enough, watch a prairie-dog town for a while. As a former farm-ranch-boy, I can tell you about such things! You may have to sit still for only minutes, or it might be hours or even days… The excitement comes in fits and starts; it’s “bursty”, in tech-speak. But sooner or later, you’ll see a prairie dog popping his head up out of one of those elevated holes… Perhaps even standing tall, on his hind feet… And making LOUD announcements! If you can understand prairie-dog, he is saying, “Watch out! Eagles and hawks, wolves and dogs, snakes and humans, oh my!” He’s scolding the predators, and warning all p-dogs, “beware”! He’s looking out for his fellow p-dogs… Often warning his biologically-genetically related p-dogs. An elementary step towards cooperative and then cultural, civilized behavior. … Similarly, in HPE cube-lands, if you sit there for long enough (no need to sit very still here, actually; the actors here are LOOKING to attract your attention), you’ll see engineers popping their heads out over the tops of their cubes (maybe even standing on office chairs, and standing on their hind paws, hazardous though that may be), and announcing to all in cube-land, “Lo and behold, for all to see! Co-worker XYZ has just come to ME, the All-Knowing Mega-Uber-Wizard, for help, at the mere task of making provisions for dis-ambiguating the slack pointers, for protecting the multi-snore OSPQW, in the event of a defrabrullator-coherency meltdown!”. If you perform elementary anthropological investigations afterwards, you’ll find that worker XYZ was merely trying to save hours or days or weeks of his/her work, so he/she went to Super-Duper-Wizard (or other specialist at that narrow skill), since (Uber-PCI-Express-Wizard or other, fill in the blank) Whatever-Wizard does it all day every day, and XYZ does this particular thing once, only every few years. XYZ made the mistake of thinking that efficiently getting it done QUICKLY, for HPE, by using a primary attainment of human cultural civilization, AKA “job specialization/cooperation/teamwork”, was more important than appearing to know everything, and being smarter than your co-worker. So now, XYZ will lick his/her wounds, and learn to study the manuals for hours or days on end, next time this sort of thing happens, rather than approaching Uber-Wizard for some quick help. XYZ will dream of the day when Uber-Wizard comes to him or her, and the tables are turned, and XYZ can get up on that chair, popping out above ALL of the cubes in Cube-Land, to announce that Uber-Wizard doesn’t know how to re-calibrate the deflection parameters tables of ionizing radiation-gradients so as to optimize provisions for radiation hormesis. … The advantages of civilization have been negated here, because it’s a ruthless war of all against all, under the constant threat of layoffs, with the losers of the ego-wars being the ones selected for layoffs. … But it gets even worse than that: If you think about it, the engineers (who indulge in this kind of behavior) have sunk (at least in this instance of behavior-categories) to a level of evolution below that of many animals! At least the prairie dogs, when they pop their heads out to make loud announcements, are looking out for the entire town of p-dogs. The same can NOT be said for the engineers… They’re looking out ONLY for themselves. There’s no cooperation here, unlike in prairie-dog-town.
Would HPE PLEASE try to promote civilized behavior, and teamwork, rather than sponsoring a ruthless war of all against all!?!?!? Do you REALLY expect good and sustainable results from the prairie-dog-eat-prairie-dog environment that you’ve created? Your “bell curve” performance reviews, AKA “rank and yank”, “forced mentally-disturbed-predation”, “stacked rankings”, whatever you want to call it (and then you have the unmitigated GALL to deny that you’re doing it), are a prime culprit, especially when combined with clueless management, never-ending layoffs, and un-ethical workers.