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He sums up, for me at least, the folly of moving from working out amongst the people to going full on administration. There wasn’t much of a career ladder and the only way to advance short of going back to school for a PhD was to shift to local administration. During my time in the workplace we were administratively consolidated into three different administrative umbrellas and each time the “suits” in Austin were further removed from the reality of the actual task.

Reminds md of my first internet ISP.
When I signed up they had technicisns who knew their stuff and could actually talk to users like me who used Linux and had networking experience.
But by the time I had a problem it had bedn taken over three times and all I could get out of them was to restart the access manager (a piece of Windows software.)
I wasn’t about to buy a Windows computer just for my ISP’s sake. I found another ISP that’s been good to me for about 20 years now. And can refer me to real technicians when I need one.

For all the people who swear that the CEO deserves 400 times the pay of the average worker, they sure do never trealize half the stuff the guy on the floor making 400 times less knows.

My 6 years working as a casual day laborer taught me who the most important person in the organization is:

If the CEO of a corporation goes on a 3-week junket to Fiji, it really only affects maybe a couple dozen people. But if the guy who changes the toilet paper is out for one day, it can shut the whole operation down.

Who is really more important?

I read eyes hand back as if it was one item instead of three. I thought to myself, “What’s an eye hand back?”

The main problem with capitalism is that some people don’t understand the concept of “enough.” If we could ever organically bake that into the system, we’d be golden.

I spent 21 years working for a major Office Supplies / Copy Shop big box store, and this was exactly it. We had decent morale, and made a lot of money for the company, but our corporate office viewed morale as a symptom of not working hard enough. Corporate bullsh!t is what killed us. Our company started measuring things that had no value, just to have something to yell at us about. They installed a webcam over the only door, just a motion detector really, and started punishing us for how many people it “counted” vs. “dollars per transaction.” Never mind the actual income, which met/exceeded the wildly inflated budget most of the time, suddenly if there were too many blips on the motion detector, you had an hour-long conference call every week where the District Manager made you write an action plan/apology to “fix it.” They are literally shutting the doors tomorrow, June 9th 2023. No one was willing to work there anymore.

My theory on this is that when you have a system that has reached an optimal level of sustainable performance there will still be some manager in the line that will feel the need to justify their bonus by squeezing out that additional .05%. It’s not sustainable and the energy required exceeds the net benefit but that manager now has a check box filled in on their resume. It is often easier to go after some easily observable but mostly meaningless metric than to deal with bigger but vastly more difficult issues. This also seems to sum of a lot of the government these days.

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