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The Living Dilbert?
AirmanTux asks: "Next march I will be separating from the US Air Force, after six years wearing 'the uniform', working in the closest thing to IT that the military has. For certain reasons, I've come to the conclusion that I will be more effective in serving the US public out of uniform than in it. There seems to be a common belief that the civilian sector is just as disorganized and mismanaged as the uniformed services. Do you think this is true? Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission), or has America become one big living Dilbert strip?"
did you try searching for a GS job at usajobs.com? I plan on getting a GS job when my enlistment is over. if you have a clearance try clearancejobs.com. hope that helps.
I work for a large organization, which as a result of it's size, has a sizeable ammount of beaurocratic BS. Perhaps I've been lucky, but I don't feel my management is as pathetic as portreryed in the strips...not even close. I think it helps to work for a company that takes IT seriously, as a genuine method for improving the business and not a dreaded tax to be paid like waste removal or maintenance. Unfortunately I have no insight as to how to determine this from the outside.
But, people are people. I might make a vague generalization about the personality types that join the military, but that probably won't be productive.
Blar.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Not really...there are places where performance and ability advance, but they are few and far between indeed, and primarily in small establishments. To most employers, employees are disposable commodity, a necessary evil that is to be pruned or removed at the earliest possible convenience. Management has become the science of keeping up appearances, with many managers being completely ignorant of the trade they are in, or the tasks of the workers they supposedly manage. Color me a pessimist, but the way I see it, Dilbert has gone from a sarcastic parody to a photorealistic portrait of the American workforce.
After 4 years in the Marines I was ready to get out to the "real" world... a world free of BS and well paying cool jobs. Well I got my degree in Comp Sci and was ready to face the world. Upon getting a job with a large corporation, I was amazed at the amount of BS there. It made the military look like an efficient & well-oiled machine. After 5.5 years now in the corporate world I ahve come to one conclusion... you alone can't make a damn difference. Either you will like it or you won't. I have finally realized that being my own boss is the way to go and thus I am pursuing that vigorously.
As for you my friend, take a walk through the corporate jungle and see if its your kinda thing. You can always do your own thing!
http://psychicfreaks.com/But that can be avoided! If, instead of working at a large company, you seek out a small fledgling business to work at, you will find that the benefits are proportional to the results and not to politics. A small business, especially one with 20 employees at the most, cannot afford to play these political games. These businesses are usually owner-operated, and the owner cares about moving forward in life. That's why he is taking the tremendous risk and creating jobs for his employees. These organizations usually have one boss, around whom the whole business revolves. There might be one other manager, but usually, everyone runs around the boss asking questions and finding out what he wants them to do. This is the perfect business to work in, if you're a people-person. You go over there, and start at whatever level you can get. Since there aren't thousands of employees, the owner of the business will quickly see how you learn and operate. If you do a good job, you'll find yourself earning a lot of trust and capability in the company. Your opinions will be heard. And if you can be a team member, not just by doing your job, but by learning a bit about everyone's job, learning how the owner thinks, what he wants to accomplish, etc., you can take a lot of that pressure off the owner.
By doing all of this, you can help the business grow in terms of profit, which will make it grow into a larger company. Eventually, that means the office will become a Dilbert strip, or something out of Office Space. You'll have a Lumberg working under you a few levels down. But who cares? At this point, you will have helped the U.S. economy, you will have created jobs, you will have grown the company into something successful and long lasting, and you will be at a high position at the top, earning a high salary, and no doubt owning a good portion of the stock. You'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
I happen to be in the Air National Guard currently and am well on my way to making it my career, though not in IT. I have my Master's Degree in Computer Science, and had the privledge of doing my research work with the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. I can tell you with a great amount of certainty that the driving forces between government and public IT are worlds apart. In Air Force/Government IT, there is little motivation to strive to learn more skills. Pretty much anyone can enlist into a technical field and they're all put through the same relatively short, simple training. In my opinion, they're amateurs on an unjustified power trip. There is significantly higher motivation for learning new skills in the public sector because it will actually make a difference for the individual. When you become invaluable, your status and pay reflect that, generally, in the public sector. Definetly not so in government positions. I do completely agree that an individual with a strong desire to learn and expand skills and knowledge can be of immense use in the public sector. However it takes a supernatural kind of driving force to penetrate the mundane aura of government IT.
Stay away from state-run universities if you want to avoid the same sort of red-tape and bullshit you find working for Uncle Sam.
I'm working for a very wealthy private univesity and it's much better than the state one where I worked before. It's easier to get fired at a private place so do you work and obey the rules. If you like total job security despite the BS factor, you might enjoy working for the state--here in Texas, it took an act of God to get fired because the managers (at least where I worked) never kept enough of the right paper work to do the necessary documentation to terminate an employee.
However, universities have a bad habit of higher their own graduates and favoring them in promotions--they've never been anywhere else so changes come slow if not 10 years behind everyone else. The management types are usually not as sharp as the managers in the corporate world--mostly because they wouldn't survive out there so they're also playing the job security card.
There's also little upward mobility. But, in the right position, you're an 8-5, weekends off, extra week off between Xmas and New Years Day kind of cush job.
Oh, at the pay scale is usually lower than the corporate market bears--but you won't get laid off.
There's lots of trade-offs but you have to decide what you want.
Good luck--having "USMC" on my resume qualified me for prison guard, police work, or mall security. Hope USAF is more helpful to you.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Dilbert can be classified as a form of observational comedy, similar to Seinfield. The reason why this is so funny is because it takes observations from real-life situations, and exaggerates them. Therefore, they aren't a 100% mirror reflection of reality, however they start off with a kernel of truth to them. They bring about a representation of the way we feel about situations, but just as New Yorkers aren't quite like portraied on Seinfield, the private IT sector isn't exactly like Dilbert either.
Agreed... when the company is below a certain size, everybody can exist within the same monkeysphere, and several hundred thousand years of social evolution help things along. In much larger organizations, multiple monkeyspheres form, leading to indifference and inefficiency at best, or low-level tribal warfare at worst.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In my opinion, they're amateurs on an unjustified power trip.
First of all, my hat's off to all who have served our country in the military, but something is very, very strange and wrong going on with the way the AF and Army train their IT folks and what quality of actual usable knowledge, experience and attitudes those people have when they leave the service and apply for their first civilian IT jobs after leaving the service. I used to be a hiring manager for an organization that primarily did systems integration, installations and support for state and local government and we interviewed a lot of newly ex-mil IT applicants and the above statement generally hits the nail right on the head. Of course there were exceptions to the rule, but by and large it seemed like most of these applicants got very little broad-coverage training in the real IT world, but instead were all pidgeon-holed into little isolated sub-sections of IT training and knowledge without being able to be immediately competant at the "big picture" without substantial re-training and what I'd call "reverse brainwashing". Yet every one of them thought they knew it all better than everyone else, and one of the most common answers in the interview questions about where they saw themselves in 3 to five years of working for us was "to become the senior manager/director of the whole IT department"... in other words to run off the existing boss and take over. Wrong answer.
Amateurs on an unjustified power trip indeed.
We did hire a few of these over the years and they turned out to be some of the worst IT employees we ever had. A recurring theme was a lack of respect for proper software licensing. One particular worst offender would take a master copy of the full corporate MS Office Professional edition and install it on every desktop he touched regardless of whether the customer had purchased the full version for that machine or not. Of course the end-users loved it, but when the tech was confronted with what he was doing he said that he knew he would not be the one getting in trouble for it, but rather his boss would and the sooner he could get the boss in trouble or fired, the better chance he thought he'd have to move up, take over and "rule with an iron fist".
I'm posting A/C because now my company considers ex-military IT techs at the very bottom of the list when hiring due to too many problems we've had with them in the past. We actively discriminate against them due to getting burned too many times.
The best quality IT folks we've been hiring the past couple years now come from two radically different groups of people. The first group is the young Computer Science geeks right out of college who are still trainable/mouldable before they can pick up too many bad habits, and the second groups is older college degreed people (late 30's to early-mid 40's) who have had one non-IT professional career for a while (but were above-average proficient as technology users) and then have gone back to school to get their CompSci or MIS degrees and have changed careers to the IT field.
I think I have a pretty good perspective on the "Dilbert factor". I have worked for Chevron (9 years), IBM (3 months) and McKinsey (2 years) and was 1 degree of separation from Scott Adams when he was at Pacific Bell. So there's my big company experience.
On the other side, I am the owner of a 15 person IT consulting firm which services only companies of 10 to 200, and so I have worked with over 50 companies of this size - in addition to owning one.
Here is the simple truth of the matter:
If a small company runs on politics, rather than business sense, it goes out of business. Yes there are exceptions - owner has a huge chunk of cash to burn - but this is very largely true. So there is very little b.s. in small business.
In large businesses, sad but true, it becomes very very hard to distinguish the true business contribution of one person from another. Also, the consequence of a good / bad decision may take years to come to light. So, whether people say so or not, you are judged on how well you fit into the culture. If you know this, understand it and accept it, you will do fine. If you act like a typical engineer and say "but my idea was better", you will be miserable. Instead of being upset at the fact that the MBA's are running the show, sit back and ask yourself why that is. If you are as smart as you think you are - you will figure it out.
The fact is that the success of big business depends on people working together. And this quality, one of fitting in, is easier to pick out than what the true ROI of converting all those Windows servers to Linux is.
Think really, really hard on this. Don't reject reality and say "it stinks" - use a bit of ju jitsu - accept reality, understand why this reality exists, and use that understanding in an effective way to achieve your personal vision of success.
A way of thinking
This reality stinks
It shouldn't be this way
I can't affect what happens
A better way of thinking
What is really going on here?
It is this way, why is that so?
I can affect how I react to what happens.
Do this and you may be very happy at a big business since you will learn how to rise within it to the point that you have real influence. If you don't understand this you will be frustrated regardless of where you work.
Upon getting a job with a large corporation, I was amazed at the amount of BS there. It made the military look like an efficient & well-oiled machine.
I agree. After leaving the Army, I moved through several jobs. The nonprofit world was amazing. Determining accountability for anything was like trying to nail jello to a wall. Government contracting made me realize that people who create small contracting companies and latch onto a contract or two are on the gravy train. The way government spending works, you pretty much *must* spend the money your contracting agency has allocated for you. If I had the stomach to put up with Inside-the-Beltway bullshit, I would have gone into government contracting. Big businesses (I speak only from experience with the Silicon Valley kind) are often full of energy, but the biggest problem, as with the rest of the civilian world, is that organizational leaders simply do not have much leadership training.
I don't know how it was for you in the Air Force, but I was in general impressed with the leaders I worked for in the Army. I'm sure to some degree it's a matter of your specialty, plus luck of the draw. But when you find a set of good leaders in the civilian world, in my experience it is a rare treat. Even the juggernauts of the Information Age have a great deal of employee churn, and they seldom devote necessary resources to adequately training leaders (mid-level managers in particular). That's where the Dilbert Factor is nurtured and brought to full bloom.
Others have mentioned this, but you may truly find that going small and/or going it alone may work for you. If you can maintain the military work ethic, you'll probably have an advantage over most of your competitors, at least in the areas of initiative, attention to detail, knowledge of the importance of planning, and ability to prioritize.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
When Bob got his project greenlighted when my supervisor did not, because Bob was capable of making a business case for it at a meeting chaired by the guy he'd been grooming for months, was that B.S? Seems to me like thats "creative use of resources". You can either continue to laugh ruefully at the world and scorn "small talk" and "politics" and "useless meetings and reports and that bureacratic "#$"%" or you can be like Bob.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Not voting is no good.
I will happily grant you that both major candidates may suck in any given election and that you might well want to protest by not voting for either one. (I do not agree with your idealistic "sullying my hands" position - I think if one of those candidates is less bad to you you should vote for them, and I think in most real cases one candidate is less bad to you if you bother to check. But that's not my major point, so I'll assume they're exactly even for now.)
But the _biggest_ consistent problem we have which makes the two candidates both suck is that the two incumbent parties have a strangehold on who we get to choose from. Voting for a third party candidates drives up the visibility of third parties existing and drives up the likelihood that OTHER people will vote for third parties.
As a bonus, if enough people do it for a presidental campaign then they get federal election money.
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