Slashdot Mirror
Hunting Bad CIOs In Their Natural Environment
onehitwonder writes "Bad CIOs are a blight on the IT profession, the organizations that employ them and the IT staff who toil under them (usually cleaning up their messes). Yet bad CIOs manage to migrate largely undetected — like the mythic Big Foot — from company to company. In the process, these bad CIOs lay waste to businesses and information systems, destroy staff morale, pillage budgets and imperil shareholder value. To help rid the world of this scourge, CIO.com has compiled a list of behaviors common among bad CIOs that recruiters, hiring managers and IT staff can use to identify them during the recruiting process."
Pointy hair
They seriously tell people to avoid those who complain about a lack of security and request funds to do something about it. This seems like a false economy to me.
I am officially gone from
Hey, I think I work for this guy!
[anonymous for job security reasons]
It may be tagged humour, but I see too many signs pointing at our CIO... -.-
Is it for sure that we can't shoot them?
home
FTA: Young and old flee the CIO's flock. Unusually high levels of staff turnover in the IT department after the new CIO has joined... Ya think? Some departments empty out like rich people leaving the Titanic once you bring in someone new, which is usually a bad sign. A good, sensible leader will often spend the first part of his/her tenure just watching and learning, before making any huge changes (unless they're hatchet men, in which case I'll be the one wearing a dress floating off in the lifeboat)
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
look at the state of it ! click next ten times to read another 100 words with 30+ adverts per page ! in fact most of the content on that site is advertising of one sort or another they should look at their own management ethos before criticising others "hey lets set up site that has more adverts on it than a domain squatters" here's the print version because as a CIO i wouldnt waste my time reading a site like that http://www.cio.com/article/print/186800
dbadirect, the place was a trainwreck kept afloat by marketing and sales alone. IT was a mess, backstabbing in the noc, the best oracle guys left, and the ones who stayed behind were always out to make everyone else look bad.
then a sublist....
Behaviors observers should note when the CIO has settled in his new habitat.
and then there is a sublist within that second main list (in case you werent confused yet):
MORE SIGNS OF BAD CIOS
Why are programmers non-productive?
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Blake Edwards said it best when receiving his oscar for life-long achievement: "I want to thank my enemies too. I couldn't've done it without the enemies...."
I reported to a bad CIO for years. First off, the mind of a politician isn't much different from that of a corporate-climber. I found the same mind in my experiences with attornies. It's enough to make anyone appreciate the misanthrope Jonathan Swift. At the core of all these folks is a basic deceptiveness invented, grown and maintained with one single goal: power.
I've read Ringer and I've read Lewis. Ringer says, "Look out for number One." Lewis rebutes (although he wrote this before Ringer by decades), "a life devoid of virtue is simple a life looking out for number one.... and void of its purpose...." Or something to that effect.
I could write a novel containing my thoughts and experiences on the bad CIO, but in short I believe being absent any real talent, being totally goal-oriented and power-hungry, they practice basic machievelian manipulations and mob psychology to intimidate people into staying in line.
In my experience, any true and honest person that happened into an officer position at a corporation is quickly devoured by the meat-eaters.
If you want a life and job filled with honest work, non-game-playing individuals and good sleep at night, then read the signs and minds of those around you, build yourself, bend the questionable intentions of those around you into tools that form who you are, and, as Shakespeare put it, "to thine ownself be true." Eventually, you'll find that job and slowly realize "yes, I'm here. I can just do a fulfilling job and get paid."
Trust me, it happens....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
These are not characteristics of a bad CIO, but characteristics of a bad manager. TFA reads like headunter-scum puffery. It would point at any incompetent boss.
"Nothing to see here folks. Move along." -- Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun
and I breezed through it in about 90 seconds.
Maybe your personal CIO skills are deficient! You could start your CIO career by learning how to lock down your own personal computer.
Likewise, when you recount a CIO's (or anyone else's, for that matter) behaviour to them, they won't recognise it as "bad". So there's little point in writing an article on recognising bad CIOs and then publishing it in an article for CIOs. They'll all either agree or disagree on the points, but none will see their own behaviour described there.
From a company's perspective, the only questions that really matter are whether the CIO being interviewed has a record of delivering programmes of work on target, on budget. That they can successfully turn around a failing (but not turn around a successful) IT department and that they positioned the IT dept. to allow a company to grow efficiently.
It doesn't matter if they name-drop or brown-nose. Anyway a hiring CIO just wouldn't recognise the pattern of behaviour - whether they, themselves, are good or bad.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is really quite fascinating. I speak to between ten and thirty CIO's every day as part of my job. The exact number, obviously, depends on how generous their PA's are feeling, and their availability. Part of my job involves speaking to these executives to find out about their current priorities for the department over the course of the next financial year. After reading this, it's frankly astonishing how many of the individuals I've spoken to are guilty of these. Obviously, you can't qualify all of the points discussed in the article through one phone call. The one which stands forward most clearly in my mind was the CIO who crowed at me for a couple of minutes about what his budgets were like, and how he'd just cleared his server room to six blade servers because he'd virtualised so much of the infrastructure and blah blah blah. I spoke to his GM of Infrastructure, who told me that the CIO in question spent almost all of his time in the office, door closed, and would only pop his head out of the office to go to vendor meets or crow about who he was playing golf with that weekend. This GM was doing more of the IT to Business communication that the executive that he directly reported to was doing. I hear stories like this all the time.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
While the "funny" comment asked if we could shoot them, it does raise a serious point. How do we (be it entry level IT staff to the people reporting directly to the CIO) get the CIO's boss to understand just how horrible people like this are?
Until I switched positions (actually quit and was convinced to take a position in a different group), I was stuck working for a new CIO (well, different title, same job in his mind) who fits the article perfectly. Now I see my replacement in the same position I was in. The CIO's boss is apt to think, "oh, these old people just can't adjust to a new boss and a new/stricter/better way of doing things." (The "better" assumes the CIO's boss was tricked by the jargon.)
So, how can we prevent these hoodlums from ruining our lives and get them either not hired to begin with or canned when we see their complete incompetence?
How many slashdotters are applying for CIO positions?
A lot of these behaviors seem like they should be red flags for any candidate for any position, no?
In practice, because shareholder elections are a farce, most boards are compromised by being populated by other executives, typically leading companies in the same or similar industry as the executives they are supposed to oversee. This frees executives from shareholder control, essentially giving them reign over other people's assets. Lavish stock grants entrench executives by giving them share ownership which in turn increases their control over the board.
Freed from oversight, executive goals diverge from shareholder goals. The limits to this divergence are mostly appearance based. You can't appear to be diverging from shareholder goals too much. Image is everything. To achieve this, executives typically vet those they hire based on loyalty. Many employees, while they profess to understand this, do not. So I repeat. To achieve the goal of appearing to promote shareholder values, executives hire first and foremost on the candidate's ability to be loyal to the hiring executive. This results in the typical knuckle dragging tribal culture found leading today's corporations.
Saying that solving this problem is hard, is a major understatement because you are talking about making America's ruling class accountable. Solutions like co-determination do exist, however, but would require the right political climate to implement.
Politicus
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Because their time is wasted in meetings.
or because they spend too much time messing around: working on things they consider interesting, rather than the job they are paid to do
Why are programmers rebellious?
Because the management interferes too much.
or because they have too much spare time and not enough to keep them occupied (Idle hands are the devil's tools)
Why are the programmers resigning one by one?
Because they are burnt out.
or because they are bored and unchallenged. No-one would hire a burn-out, because they're a liability. Better to hire a fresh, energetic employee.
In this alternative view, the fault is still in the management sphere, but is due to them not keeping discipline, enforcing deadlines, high standards, recognising and rewarding good work.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Listen to nobody, get rid of the useful applications, keep the crap, layoff thousands, dont listen to the business needs & centralize everything then connect everyone to a centralized data center without upgrading the network infrastructure. It kept Walmart from expanding outside the US without massive problems now you make HP your next little experiment..... 5 min for outlook to the exchange server...thats the mark of a good CIO
I formerly worked at ATMI, and they employed the dumbest CIO they could find. He has no IT training or knowledge, claiming his managerial accounting background will allow him to do the job. The CEO is a guy that surrounds himself with yes-men, and Kevin Laing is his personal puppy of a CIO.
Kevin hired an infrastructure director, who was trying to gown up in our clean room and couldn't find any left handed rubber gloves. It's no wonder the companies stock has been flatlining for the past 5 years.
Those poor bastards still working there will never get an annual bonus, because the CIO blows the budget horribly every year. The Help Desk manager has run off all the competant staff with full blessing of the CIO, I just don't see any upside to this guy at all. If the CEO and CIO were fired tomorrow, I'd guess there would be a jump in the stock just because they would be gone.
Key attributes of Kevin LaingKevin
Irrational Diversions
Bah. The correct way to recruit, for any position not just CIOs, is to look around and identify top talent, then *invite* them to your company. Posting an ad and then trying to decipher resumes is really not an intelligent way to hire anyone, let alone CIOs. You should, of course, post an ad and have a brief look at resumes in case there's some talent out there who has no connections to you or is invisible, so that they have a chance to reach you. But in general, most good talent is visible in some way, so you can watch them from a distance, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and then invite them when you need them (this of course doesn't guarantee that they will come, but it is for this reason that you should always keep a list of multiple potential CIOs that you could invite rather than just 1).
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic. They may change employers for a great number of reasons, only some of them having even the slightest to do with their own performance, and many times the performance of a person is contingent on their environment. A resume cannot tell you anything about a person or their future performance. Academic degrees, even from top tier schools, mean nothing, and you cannot even trust references as you never know how and why a person recommends another, and basing your decisions on past employment record is not useful if you can't know what they were doing while being employed there (they could be playing chess all day thanks to them being the son of the company's president, etc).
There is only one way to know whether a person will perform well: you have a set of requirements, and the person in front of you claims they can satisfy them. The way to know rather than guess their future performance is to *test* them, in real or near-real environments.
How to test a CIO? You first have to identify what a CIO has to do within your company. Oftentimes, CIOs design processes and rules for information sharing, protection, and processing. So, if in your company you find that your CIO will likely spend their time coming up with improved processes and monitoring them, then why not get them do exactly that during the interview instead of trying to guess the unguessable from a resume or asking stupid interview questions with no meaning? One thing you could do is to have them manage a small team composed of employees in your company for 15 mins or half an hour or so, asking the wannabe CIO to devise rules that would enable the team to finish a simple virtual job quickly over the company's LAN, then simply hire the CIO who were able to make the team work faster during these 15 mins. This may cost some money, though, so you could build a computer simulation to do the same: the simulation would model some essential business processes, and the wannabe CIO would have to think of ways to let the simulated business components share information in the most effective way, then you would configure the simulator to run the policies the CIO suggested (or chosen from a multiple choice menu), and you would keep the time. Assuming the simulator was built in an intelligent way to capture the essential parameters of reality (which isn't an easy task, of course, which is why I recommend using real human teams for testing if you can spare some time), the CIO who thought of a policy that led the simulation finish faster would get hired. This doesn't even need to be done during the interview, it can be done remotely, eg over a Web-administered pre-hiring test, so you would need to invest absolutely no time and money in testing wannabe CIOs from the moment you build the test. One word of warning, though: the test must be built as to encompass emergent characteristics and complex noninear behaviours, just like real life, so that no one can predict the simulator's run time from the initial parameters.
And another word of warning: Some talent dislikes being tested too much, which is why you shouldn't ask them to be tested for more than 15-30mins at a maximum, and only once.
A CIO with a liberal arts degree who thinks he knows all about Engineering and Technology.
The absolutely worst IT executive I ever had the displeasure to work for was a woman. Arrogant, rude and completely unqualified. It turns out that she had quite a horrid reputation in her prior jobs. Made a complete mess of things and then moved along to another (local) company where she proceeded to make the same mess. I will give her points for consistency. This all appears to be simply a matter of empty suits finding one of their own for critical executive positions. To my regret I was out the day that IT became a political space and not a technical one.
The cult of personality CIO is probably the most destructive and wasteful of all of them. They're particularly dangerous in government. The last big contract I worked had one. He brought in "his" people to manage projects. Some of them were, in my opinion, charity cases. A couple had qualifications that included boarding their horses at the same riding academy. They had unproductive jobs and were bossy and abrasive on top of that. I watched them waste millions of dollars, produce nothing tangible or productive, then get promoted. The talented people took other jobs and left.
It's very demoralizing when you're trying to do the right thing for the customer and be cost effective, then see someone ride in with his toadies, blow millions on something that never had a chance of working in the first place, then get moved up the chain. Makes you question if there's a margin in being practical and productive. I always thought that if you made good business decisions in IT, the customer would eventually come back to the value proposition. But it doesn't always work that way and I'm starting to question whether that's naive.
I certainly have several first-hand experiences where the incompetent, impractical and wasteful have flourished.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
- Implemented a strict dress code that applies at all times including weekends and nights. Facility operates on a 24/7 schedule
- Not allow for Hawaiian shirts on Fri even though it is a military tradition
- Not permit flex scheduling like leave early on Friday's
- Schedule an all-hands meeting for 3 or 4 on Friday afternoon and did that routinely.
- Implement strict rules on Internet surfing such as not allowing you to change options on IE. Firefox and Netscape not allowed. The options does not allow you to bypass pop-up commercials.
- Put in a boat load of offices and cubicles in the basement but did not put in matching capacity for bathrooms. People complained and his response that if you didn't have to wait more than 20 minutes to use the toilet, then it is considered sufficient.
- On the subject of bathrooms, when he went to use the toilet, he would kick everyone else out.
- Implemented a traffic safety hotline where you can get reported for speeding and then get disciplined when you got into work. He tried to implement a vehicle inspection program since he complained about modified vehicles such as trucks and his pet peeve was dark window tinting. Luckily he was shot down on that.
Overall, this person thought he was so important....for those not wanting to read TFA: "Check References."
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I wrote up a little follow up on my article (I won't show it for fear of being /.'d). But I think a good follow up question to this article is how to prevent these people from either getting to this level or staying. I've been in two separate companies where someone on the IT executive level (either a director or CIO) fell into what was outlined in the article. Being that in both places they worked in Japan, I think most people felt compelled not to rebel as most staff here almost never voice their concerns. However, in both instances there were high turn over rates. In one company, long after I left, the director got kicked out (he claimed personal issues). In the first situation, eventually people in management heard about what was going on and gave him the boot. He couldn't find a job anymore in Tokyo because he developed a terrible reputation around town, spread by others who were terrorized by him and his henchmen. In the other case, all the IT staff is far too weak to speak up, especially as the CIO continues to replace all the key tech management positions with his people. I still have friends in that company and I feel bad for them coming under pressure.
Still, I feel that the IT staff should have the ability to do something from within to protest the fact that these executive types are viruses and do more harm to the industry than anything else. I've had different ideas like IT unions, stricter contracts, feedback systems to HR, limited terms, the inability to poach from previous positions, and even a higher degree of accountability when certain goals are not met (kinda like how CEOs and CFOs are even more responsible than before in public companies). Anyway, it would be interesting to hear others' opinions on this matter.
... He/she insists all articles be broken up into multiple pages so as to force more page views thus increasing advertising revenue while making the internet suck even more.
How can You Identify Bad CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs (C?O) .... in Their Natural Habitat?
....
Bad C?Os are a blight on the the organizations that employ them, national business community, academic reputations, domestic and international economics, and the health and welfare of the public. The list of behaviors common among bad C?Os will prevent you from hiring them into your organizations. If they're already there, it will give you good reason to eliminate them. The list is summarized by the bottom line.
In simplistic terms does the C?O proportionally profit more-than the company and stock-holders/investors.
In simplistic terms does a politician proportionally profit more-than the public, teachers, first responders, warriors
In simplistic terms does the cleric proportionally profit more-than the believers of the myths.
IOW/IMO: Profiting by fraud/scam is evil and amoral, but may not be criminal/illegal; So, I never show anyone of great wealth and faux-power any respect until they earn it with me personally. Many wealthy, not all, well maybe most are amoral back stabbing, cruel, evil people of small mental and emotional stature, but their sociopathic personalty skills are guilt-free exceptional. POTUS Dick Chaney is a prime example, VPOTUS Carl Rove another example, (Puppet) PPOTUS GWBush a pitiful dogmatic dummy for the other two clowns that have harmed far more than they will ever help.
As Winston would say, 'Never have so few done so much harm too so many Citizens in the history of the USA!'
As FDR would say, 'We had nothing to fear; Except our leaders, whom will live forever in infamy for treason against The USA Constitution and US Citizens!'
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
We don't need a list of what they do! We need a list of who they are! So we can check it when job hunting. Now that would be helpful.
Man, I tried to read the article, but I just couldn't get past how aweful the CIO website is. It's like a case study on how NOT to design a website. Articles that are broken into 10 pages, with each 'page' being 2-3 paragraphs. Pages where *90 percent* of the page is NOT THE ARTICLE but crap surrounding the article. Page design that uses absolute layouts that cause about 40 percent of the available space on my widescreen display to be filled with empty nothingness.
The Board of Directors at CIO need to fire their Bad CIO and get one who can bring in a team that'll make their website not suck.
I think a big problem in most organizations is insufficient bottom-up feedback. A CIO may be a great kiss-up to the CEO, but may otherwise be a crappy manager. If a formal process was put in place such that underlings ranked their supervisors, then the bad ones would either have to shape up or ship out.
One interesting approach is a list of about 15 traits, and employees pick the top 3 that the manager needs to improve on. This avoids a "blunt" ranking that many organizations dislike, but at least gives the top layer feedback on the biggest problems.
Table-ized A.I.
An outfit I worked for a few years ago had a good CIO and IT department, when measured against other companies IT departments. But we were (and I stress were) a great engineering and manufacturing company. IT was, in times past, only a tool used in that busiiess process.
At some point, the folks on mahogany row became bedazzled with the culture of information and forgot exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing. In corporate speak, they neglected their core competencies. The IT department did a great job in standardizing processes and tools and upgrading systems where cost/benefits warranted it. But this was all measured with metrics viewed from the information systems side of the house, not the production side.
Pretty soon, we had cheap and efficient IT systems. But the engineering and production systems suffered where their requirements didn't meet the IT template. Processes that had been developed to give our company an edge over our competition were dropped in favor of using industry standard tools.
I'm certain that our CIO will receive the respect and admiration that he deserves along his career path. He did what he promised, within schedule, budget and with quality. But our profit margins and market share suffered as we became a commodity.
Unless your business is the IT business (Google, Microsoft, etc.) they are just tools folks. Far too many CEOs and BoDs were dazzled by the shinney server racks.
Interesting note: About a decade ago, when we were looking for better ideas and processes, our managers traveled to Japan to see how companies like Toyota and others achieved their efficiencies and profits. Along with lots of good process ideas, they brought back an interesting observation. The Japanese hadn't really bought into big enterprise-wide IT systems. Some of their best processes used clip-boards and paper.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ours got CIO of the Year!
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204702770
This was a running joke inside our company as the man was considered woefully incompetent and borderline retarded by all who worked in IT. His true gift was looking like CIO and convincing IT magazines that he was good.
... because they hope that the bad CIO will do to the competition what he/she has just finished doing to the current company.
Keeps a cattle prod in his office.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Offshoring is a recommendation, and they aren't talking about oil.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
CIO job is a joke. Some stupid bunch of exec-staff decided to have a pal in the board room to help their way through email and attachments and accessing their portfolio. So they founded a new job Chief Information Officer. IT is part of the company operations and only a small part that encourages the use of computers. I see that in many companies cost of IT and its maintenance is more than the cost of the company operations without IT. Exec staff don't care and that is because IT projects are many a times unreviewed. Many suits are still unaware of the actual cost of IT and the overhead every department incurs and the savings/loss for each department.
Parent was a quote from The Tao Of Programming(read it for free there). It's great and I recommend it for every programmer and anyone who manages programmers. The sequel to it, "The Zen of Programming" is still in print, IIRC.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
The evil person knows when they perform immoral activities and decides to allow or perform the evil/immoral act.
... if you're going to flame my english/spelling please add a few comments about the concepts/content presented. Is the POTUS Chaney? Is the POTUS nuts or evil? Can the POTUS be considered (conceptually) a C*O?
The amoral person never considers morality (right/wrong) of their actions and decides to allow or perform the act.
The amoral person is not evil, the amoral person is totally fucking nuts, and a significant danger to people around them.
The evil person is not insane, but is a significant danger to people around them. If the evil person was POTUS, then there is a (Hitler-Level) significant danger to humanity.
Also, n6kuy, next time
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Why would you work for a person like that?
If your boss called you in and said "You were driving fast", what would you say? My response would be "yeah, so what?". If your boss said "you changed your browser", my response would be "yeah, so what?" (in fact, my PC is so non-standard everybody knows just not to look at it anymore).
The worst that can happen to you is getting fired. If you're not afraid of that, then what's left for your boss to do? I just got a new boss about 5 months ago (a "C" level), after a few weeks, I sat down with him and said "My old boss still works in this company, and she'll tell you that I'm unmanageable. I'm too old to change and so are you, so we'll have to learn to live with each other just the way we are". He chuckled and we've had an excellent working relationship. If he wouldn't have liked my little sermon, then I probably would have quit. No use him and me making each other miserable.
Let me put it another way, and in my 27 year IT career (quite successful, thanks), I've adopted one simple maxim:
"If I'm going to get fired, I'm going to get fired for doing the right thing"
And it lets me sleep at night without worrying about anything.
Why would you work for a person like that?
Not much choice in the matter. The company I worked for told me to work at that facility. Luckily I was far enough down the food chain that I didn't have to deal with him. On the computer settings, they are enforced administratively. The options to block pop-ups or not are simply "greyed" out - you couldn't change the setting. On loading better alternative web browsers, couldn't be done unless you had administrative privileges. Getting the alternative browsers required special permission from your manager plus the CIO himself.
"If I'm going to get fired, I'm going to get fired for doing the right thing"
That is a good maxim. I always lived by that as well. I have gotten in trouble many times for following that.
- CORedneck
Last year, we got our IT department in the top 10 Infoweek's list of "best" IT departments, despite the fact that we're the worst. We did it as a goof, and got away with it. Pretty damned funny. Even the CIO didn't quite believe it.
So, it's hard to take any of those lists seriously.
But those are just (some of) the attributes of a bad executive of any sort. The only thing that makes CIOs special is that they are probably the only executives that most slashdotters ever have dealings with.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I once worked at a company with a bad CIO who had a lot of the attributes described in the article. One time, he was following a link from a company website to another that had an nntp:// link that opened up a Usenet group in Outlook on his PC. He responded with internal ravings about "Why is this negative crap on OUR CORPORATE WEBSITE!?"
Yes, we had a CIO that couldn't distinguish between NNTP and HTTP and couldn't tell the difference between Internet Explorer and Outlook.
I've worked for some very good and some really bad CIO's. The one thing every bad CIO had in common was that they were ex-DEC executives. This is not a judgment just an observation. SG
One method to accomplish what you are talking about is 360 degree feedback.
The basic idea is that you get evaluated by superiors, subordinates, peers, you yourself, and sometimes customers. In other words all the stakeholders in your job performance.
Its very effective, but complicated in a paper based system. A simple web app could handle it quite nicely though.
...some of the more stellar behaviors I have seen over the years;
- No knowledge of actual standards (including refusal to believe in almost any Open Source options, the only one he agrees to is the MySQL boxen because he has no choice)
- No actual technical knowledge. Claims to have been in management so long, its all antiquated. To which I wonder how you can be useful as anything other than a glorified secretary if you do not actually understand anything about your operating environment.
- Fixation on paperwork-generating processes as a crutch against ineptitude and poor planning.
- Completely devoid of a spine, and buckles like wet cardboard under any pressure from the COO, who is the only person more staggeringly incompetent than he is.
- Is having an affair with the director of HR (possibly as a job-saving measure).
If you cannot actually do your job, I suppose your next best thing is to posture and be project your stupidity as some kind of avant-garde performance art.
They need to hit all IT management... It is almost purely political these days...
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
AMEN!
Mod this guy up in HangingChad!
He IS really telling it, HOW IT REALLY IS!
(or rather, how it CAN be, with a 'political clique scumbag' who surrounds himself with his cronies/friends)
He's outlining how unqualified (never have done the jobs of their subordinates themselves & thus, have NO understanding of the matter @ hands, themselves, which IS crucial) idiots ruin things & how they often go about it - he's seen it, as have I, & when I read it?? I was like "Yup, seen it too".
Not promoting mgt. from within the "long time ranks" of a technical field, invites morons like the parent post to mine indicates.