In the last week, a strange thing has occurred.  At first, CH contributors were puzzled as to just why things were a little better.  Weirdly, the dims are a bit more switched on.  The dimherders are almost reasonable.  Even the dimlord has been... friendly.
We considered various possible explanations; perhaps a unique combination in biorhythms of all involved.  Maybe the planets are perfectly aligned.  We even wondered if all of the dim-crew had been replaced by beings from another planet.
But the truth is rather more revealing...  A particular person is absent, and most worryingly, this person is from the non-dim side of the fence.

Moral Compass

http://dilbert.com

How to lose a geek in 10 years

From the outside, MegaCorp is a 'halo' company; that is, the biggest, the best, and where everyone wants to be.  I fondly remember my days of ignorance, when MegaCorp excited me.  I could hardly believe I'd landed an almost 'dream' job at the biggest firm in it's field, a powerhouse of money and influence, with zillions of dollars in assets.

What I didn't know, and was yet to learn, is that MegaCorp is dangerous, potentially fatal.

MegaCorp is a little like the X-Men character, "Rogue":

Rogue (Anna Marie) is a fictional character, a Marvel Comics superheroine of the mutant super-team, the X-Men [..] Rogue considers her powers a curse. She involuntarily absorbs the memories, physical strength and, in the case of super-powered persons, abilities of anyone she touches.

Early on, the sense of 'wanting', the way MegaCorp draws you in and demands your attention, is flattering; it boosts your ego and makes you feel as though you're able to make changes, do something useful.
However, as the years roll past, the 'draw' becomes a 'suck'.  Kyle Reese (real name Michael Biehn) says it best:

Listen. And understand. That terminator MegaCorp is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

The instruments of the attack are chiefly poor management and the fact that everyone has given up; all they care about is the next pay cheque, or the next course of action that will secure their position.  No-one wants to do things 'right'.  Ethics?  Bollocks... As Dilbert points out, once you've got a fucked up moral compass, you're on the fast-track to management.

Once you realise that MegaCorp doesn't give a flying fuck about you, and all it wants to do is suck you up and spit you out, your career as a non-dim is effectively over.

Your first (and default, it seems) choice is to cruise.  You can easily become part of the beast, be assimilated, become faceless.  My CH co-author mused yesterday that MegaCorp is where IT geeks now go to die.  Whale bones everywhere...

The second choice is to get out.  It's harder than it sounds... you have to achieve a level of fury in order to produce escape veolocity necessary to beat MegaCorp's "suck", whilst at the same time, not destroying everything around you.

We're working on the second part; a how-to will be posted here...

Sadim touch

The opposite to the Midas touch, is perhaps obviously, known as the Sadim touch.  Whereas the Midas touch turns everything to gold, the Sadim touch turns everything to shit.

MegaCorp is well staffed with people that have the Sadim touch.

Got a great idea?  Present it and promote it.  It'll save millions, make life easier and fix global warming too.  Be ready though, once the Sidam touch has been applied, once the 'procedures' and 'standards' have been setup, once the apathetic people you're trying to help have given their collective 'meh'¹², your idea is no longer a huge, impressive, gleaming statue of gold; now it's grey, dark, and limp pile of poo.

Karma Police

From Wikipedia:

Thom Yorke explained the idea of the lyrics to The Independent in 2006, saying, "It's for someone who has to work for a large company. This is a song against bosses. Fuck the middle management!"

Lyric quote:

I've given all I can, but were still on the payroll
This is what you get, this is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us

Employee benefits

MegaCorp employs a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands of busy worker bees, dedicated to the 'firm' and ensuring the CEO gets his next multi-million dollar bonus.

The HR (thats 'humanity reduction') drones promote the idea of excellent 'benefits':

Come and work for MegaCorp! We're big! We've got great stuff for you to do! We'll give you excellent employee benefits!

To be honest, the list of benefits (the one you reel off to a recruitment conmanconsultant) appears long and generous.

• private healthcare package
• death in service payout
• generous holiday allowance (starting at 25 days/year)
• pension scheme
• flexible working
  

However, look more closely.

• private healthcare package - I'm fortunate enough to live in a country that provides a free[1] national health service; private health care appeals but there is a tax penalty
  
• death in service payout - a genuine and useful benefit. Of course, you'd need to die to make use if it.
  
• generous holiday allowance (starting at 25 days/year) - this one does exactly what it says on the tin; whats not written is how you'll need to use half of your holiday time to take regular small breaks away from 'work' in order to preserve your sanity and prevent burnout.
  
• pension scheme - what you 'sacrifice' from your salary is matched by the firm (so there is twice as much money for which they're not liable for tax)
  
• flexible working - you can adjust your hours & location to accomodate your lifestyle. Of the people I've consulted, MegaCorps idea of 'flexible' is vastly different to everyone elses.
  

Remember that employee benefits are a useful exercise for Megacorp; it reduces their tax burden, provides a way to suck in new victimsemployees and gives an entire HR department something to do.

So to balance the list of 'employee benefits', here is the list of 'employee risks':

• lack of sleep, stress and ultimately burnout
• instutionalisation - become stuck in the MegaCorp rut
• career dead end - MegaCorp is like a black hole, nothing escapes
• skills devaluation - do things the MegaCorp way; not transferrable to anywhere else
• increased risk of going postal

Proud to be part of the MegaCorp world.

Toy theft rocks MegaCorp

by Our Guy on the Spot

Two senior managers at MegaCorp were left crying into their trust funds yesterday, when a nasty man threatened to take their toys away.

Mr G.R.R. Jarhead and Dr. J. Quincy, from the Detection After the Fact That Something Odd was Done division, found themselves strongly resenting suggestions that their product was (to quote an unnamed source) 'a badly-implemented, ludicrously expensive pile of poorly thought-out shite'.

Following MegaCorp standard operating procedure, they immediately set about hiding the truth in an avalanche of remarkably uninformed and bitter criticism of competing products.

Luckily for Quincy and Jarhead, their monitoring product has no effective filters for lies, misrepresentations and other MegaCorp staple items (and no effective means of acting on the result of such filters if they should ever exist); so they were able to communicate effectively their ignorance of the subject matter to a wide, contemptuous and slightly bemused audience of considerably more intelligent people.

The matter was left with the MegaCorp status quo safely preserved. No advantageous changes were made, no money was saved; as a result, inefficiencies continue apace and stock prices continue in freefall.

Acronym Roulette

Life can be dull at MegaCorp. Every morning you clear out the daily dollop of meaningless crap from your Inbox; and every morning, a new flood of meeting invites insinuates its way into your calendar. These are less easy to simply delete - politically anyway, technically the same Delete key does the same job - because people can see you're not attending. That's bad, Dims automatically assume their time is more valuable than yours, and (alas) "I had better things to do than listen to you talk pony for half an hour" is not a career-enhancing excuse.

As a result, your average MegaCorp employee - we're all average, of course - spends at least five hours in any given week attending meetings devoid of one single relevant or interesting fact or opinion. Add that to the hour a day we all spend sorting through the email-based noise, that turns out at 3m hours a week spent on nothing.

Just as long as we're keeping the focus on productivity and cost-reduction.

One has to keep busy. Buzzword Bingo is a useful tool, but it's just too easy - the person with 'go ahead', 'evidences' and 'compliance' will almost always win. We need something with an element of risk; a modicum of payment; a reward for success; a real game!

I present... Acronym Roulette.

The rules are simple. You must invent acronyms that must be minuted and/or used by unsuspecting staff in the same meeting. There is a scoring system based on the acronym itself, the seniority of the person who unwittingly repeats it, and other multiplying factors. The winner is the person with the highest score. Usually, that will be whoever gets the most ludicrous acronym spoken by the most senior person.

Scoring is straightforward. Calculate the acronym's base value:

• 5 points for a harmless, non-rude acronym like 'CPO' for 'crime prevention office' or some such
• 10 points for inventing an organisation whose name ends up as a taboo word; for example, 'Network Intrusion Prevention System', NIPS
  

Simple! Now, calculate your 'delivery' multiplier:

• 2 x for delivering - deadpan, giggles lack style - the acronym for consumption in a confident, brazen manner
• 3 x for stating the full expanded name, and getting the acronym stated in in minutes
• 5 x for stating the full expanded name, and getting the acronym used in the actual call

Finally, calculate the seniority multiplier:

• 2 x for each level of seniority the person stating or minuting the acronym holds above the player, as reckoned by the official org chart

Additionally, there's the 'evasion' multiplier:

• 5 x for inventing an organisation who created the bogus acronym if challenged on the call
  

An example: I mention the 'Audit Risk Secure Environment' in a call (10 points); it's minuted as 'ARSE' (3x delivery multiplier); and the person doing the minutes was two levels above me (4x seniority multiplier); a total of 120 points. Beat that!

Why is this better than Buzzword Bingo? The risk! If you fool someone it's just funny. If they catch you on the meeting, you'll be in trouble. If they cotton on later, you'll probably be moved to the Lhasa field office to be shot by Chinese 'policemen' who'll have been told you're a Buddhist.

Then there's the 'double or quits' element. If you're busted with a bogus acronym, the fleet-of-thought will invoke the evasion multiplier and almost certainly win. Nothing tops getting away with inventing 'ARSE' by saying that the 'Domain Utilisation Monitoring Board' sponsored it. You'll certainly get fired when the Dimlord sees 'DUMB/ARSE' on the slide, but wouldn't it have been worth it?

Strato-dims fear nothing, except...

Whilst employed by a corporation several years ago, more 'little-corp' than mega-corp, there was a (then new) idea of "flattening the management structure". The big idea was that there wouldn't be more than four 'levels' between your busy non-dim (or dims...) and the CEO.
MegaCorp is yet to adapt (or even, explore) this idea. If you start with me, there are at least 8 layers of management up to the CEO; I don't know the exact figure as changing who reports to who is a form of MegaCorp management light entertainment. Still, way up there, up in the clouds, are the strato-dims.
The strato-dims are those that make their entire world revolve around "business"; their working day comprises of PowerPoint, meetings and conference calls. These are the people that 'build shareholder value' and other such strato-bullshit. Such strato-dims are mostly fearless, and willing to ruin the lives of whomever dares to step in their way.
But, they do have a weakness; their kryptonite is the gossip of the working masses. MegaCorp may be the biggest fish in the pond, but, it's time to cut costs; afterall, the CEO's next multi-millon bonus has got to come from somewhere. When times get tough, MegaCorp sheds people.
What's most curious is that no strato-dim can ever speak 'true'. The non-dims are well versed in strato-speak, so we can translate with barely a flicker of effort when a faced with announcements of "resizing", "rightsizing" or "offshoring".
The strato-dims still seems to cling to the belief that dressing up what is otherwise known as redundancies, pink slips, or p45's, will mean the masses remain calm and secure that their jobs are safe. I do wonder what the strato-dims are really afraid of...

Persistence maketh the career

MegaCorp rewards persistence, regardless of what is being persisted with.

For example, we have Geoffrey Dimhollow. Saddled with a difficult problem to solve, and an awful product with which to solve it, he persists; until someone else is dumb enough to stick their head above the parapet and solve it for him. Luckily, our boss is savvy enough to duck that flaming turd missile.

Right.

So, after we've been struggling along for a couple of years, performing the software equivalent of carefully pushing a turd - no longer flaming, but still somewhat ripe - up a steep hill with a piece of wet string, we get to a point where he has a different problem to solve. Naturally, we'd not be stupid enough to fall for it twice.

Right.

So, when trying to solve his problem again, we're pushing back harder. Dimhollow persists, and wheedles, and suggests, and regrets, and postulates, and insinuates, and persists some more. Eventually, the sheer weight of unqualified, uneducated, unmitigated, shameless irrelevant neverending crap will tip the balance. Or so he thinks. For we have strong leadership, so we won't be beaten this time.

Right.

In the hands of sages, persistence - tempered with wisdom - is a powerful, wonderful thing. In the hands of Dimhollow, persistence is the tool by which stupid ideas are made manifest by the work of others, to the benefit of noone except his own career. He won't get far. MegaCorp knows where its own interests lie.

Right.

Dim Ratio

Our part of MegaCorp stacks up like this:

Dim-creep

Our boss at MegaCorp is not a Dim. Nowhere near it. He is, however, suffering from a severe case of Dim-creep.

A key part of inspiring confidence in others is showing it in yourself and your actions, and indeed in your subordinates and their actions. This is all basic, non-Dim stuff. In the Dimcloud we expect this level of thinking (or in fact, any thinking at all) to be notable by its absence. What smarts is when confirmed, PhD-level non-Dims forget their arse and undermine months of confident prediction, persuasion and planning with a single outburst of utter, blinking stupidity.

If one is designing a better aircraft, one does not tell potential passengers that they should only fly a third of their journey on it, just in case we made a mistake. Those passengers will likely decide not to fly at all, on the grounds that a lack of confidence from the designers might be an outwards indication of a lack of competence.

You either design an aircraft or you don't. You don't design an aircraft and then fill it with bits from the last aircraft, particularly when the last aircraft is known to be a little bit broken, and will definitely stop flying in a few months anyway.

Ceaseless prevarication and incurable indecisiveness are both Dim qualities, and it's desperately sad to see them so completely embodied in one of our immediate superiors. He'll earn his Dimlord stripes early at this rate.

Another great day in hell^WMegaCorp. The dim-watchers are still asking questions although this time, they're not asking the dims, rather they're speaking to us, the non-dims.
The latest request for information has come from a dimwatcher who appears to have no technical knowledge over and above some handy TLA's. Ordinarily this isn't a problem as the dims aren't too technically minded either, however, when this dimwatcher is wielding the "pass/fail" stick, I'd hope that he has even the slightest clue about what he's examining.
I'll paraphrase some of this dimwatchers questions. Let's imagine that we are people that make cars. The questions...

1. How do we get the car to travel along the road? Is it by slingshot? Or is it pushed by slaves? Is it an on-demand process?
2. How do we drive to other peoples places? Do they have cars too?
3. How do we know that other people aren't looking at our car?
4. How do we lock the doors of the car?
5, How many roads do we have?
6. How do we drive the car?

.. and so on.

If we extend this idea a little further, it's rather like having a guy who's played Doom deciding exactly whether the UK & US governments have done a good job in Iraq.

So now us non-dims are going to have to waste yet more time explaining basic & simple concepts to the dimwatcher. This further wastes our time and productivity takes yet another nosedive.

MegaCorp survival tips - #1 in a series

ClueBrick

Description:
A regular household brick; colour is unimportant.

Directions for use:
Apply directly to forehead with force and repeat, until passing out or sanity returns.

Notes:
Not to be confused with ClueStick - a ClueBrick is for self-administration only. Use of ClueBrick on others may lead to death.


_{Credit due to UserFriendly}

Stay away from the Koolaid

Dims are lovable but thick, and are apt to wander off and hurt themselves if not carefully guided. The thankless task of helping Dims to help themselves falls to the Dimherders.

Dimherders are simple folk. Often they are Dimclimbers in their spare time, but they only prosper in top-heavy Dimclouds, where leadership is something odd that happens somewhere else, and promotion is simply an acknowledgement of time served amongst the Dim population.

It's important not to confuse Dimherders with real-world shepherds. Better to compare them with the dog. A lot of barking but no biting; and no understanding of the sheep, the shepherd, the pen, the field, the farm, the anything.

A low-level understanding of the connection between the shepherd's sheep and shepherd's mint sauce is useful when Dimclimbing.

Exemplary amongst MegaCorp's Dimherders is Diana Koolaid. Popular with ol' Cumulo Nimbus, she commands a healthy disrepect from the non-Dims burdened by her services. Dimherders, like the 'climbers they idolise, succeed by fomenting dissention where none exists (belting their sheep with Clue Removal Sticks works well); by provoking angry debate where previously only productive discussion reigned; and by promoting themselves at the expense of the reputations, home-lives and sanity of their subordinates.

Koolaid excels in the use of the 'herder arsenal. Her sheep are cracking under the strain while she bumbles her way through one counterproductive argument after another. Meanwhile, the Dimclimbers above can only marvel at the scale of her productivity; being Dims themselves, the 'climbers are limited to measures of productivity such as meeting count or volume level; not by anything as radically useful as, say, problems solved, tickets closed or value provided to the company.

This means of self-aggrandisement can only exist in corporate or government bureaucracies. In the army, for instance, one does not typically gain promotion by shooting one's old soldiers; still less, by the shooting of soldiers belonging to a neighbouring battalion on whose survival one depends.

Still, one must admire Koolaid for rising so close to true Dimclimber status with so remarkably little talent, intelligence, wit, grace, subtlety, elegance, sophistication, courage or integrity. It takes a special kind of persistence to struggle on in the face of such an overwhelming lack of ability. God Bless MegaCorp!