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oppressive corporate culture
Wednesday, December 15 1999
Don, one of the fairly new guys who was hired to process gigabytes of Unix-generated statistical data, has been suffering from low job satisfaction of late. He's a good bit older than most of the guys in engineering, yet no one has approached him to tap his ample programming knowledge. Unsatisfied with his ho-hum job of processing statistics and unable to join project teams and earn bonus money, Don gradually became embittered and cynical. His rabble-rousing statements and antics began to rival my own.
With our company's massive drive to go public, the workplace climate has become increasingly humourless and austere. Much of this can be credited to a new and especially Dan Reitmanesque attourney recently added to our staff specifically to dot all the i's and cross all the t's prior to our big IPO. What with our volatile mix of attractive young men and women, the thing he most rapidly identified as a potential legal liability is the potential for a sexual harassment lawsuit. The attourney's influence has been pervasive and chilling, especially because of its effects on the more uptight of our managers. The schoolmarmish VP of IT leaps instantly to mind.
Today Don the disgruntled programmer decided to fight back against some of this chill. In an effort to provoke the schoolmarmish VP of IT, he put up a calendar featuring local San Diego women wearing nothing but swimwear. It was fairly weak as provocations go; the calendar was in perfectly good taste and was entirely non-pornographic. But the schoolmarmish VP of IT took it down anyway, complete with a humourlessly canned monologue that demonstrated complete ignorance of the fact that she was responding predictably to a deliberate provocation.
At about this time Eric the web developer sent an email to everyone in the company telling them about a nifty new "spamming tool" he'd built. This was immediately answered by an email from our staff attourney telling us that spam was illegal and that spamming from our company would absolutely not be tolerated. Eric then found himself having an hour-long private meeting with the attourney. During this meeting he was threatened with termination, among other things. He had to clarify that what he was talking about wasn't really spam, but bulk email that people had agreed to receive.
Under the hail of these absurdities, Don came over to my cubicle and we raked our "corporate culture" over the coals. Don has been keeping on top of this subject and had some interesting things to say. It turns out that our company has a very weak Human Resources department and it's been kept this way by our "VP of Professional & Organizational Development (VPPOD)," a woman who has held her job for about eight months now. Though in her last place of employment the VPPOD had a fairly humble secretarial job, she has considerable influence in this company. Recently she has decided that she should interview all new employees to establish whether or not they fit "culturally." Don didn't think this was right at all; he sees "cultural fit" as a veiled term which actually means "job discrimination". In the case of our company, of course, the idea is to only attract the sort of young vibrant, childless types capable of working 14 hour days seven days a week. But of course such tests could be used to eliminate anyone, and all of it amounts to job discrimination. Don doesn't feel that the company should be looking at prospective employees for anything other than qualifications and work histories.
Don told me he can't take it any more and that Friday will be his last day. It's a terrible shame, really. Our company dropped the ball again, completely squandering his employment.
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