73
samir
7y

Worst experience with higher ups:

The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.

That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.

I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.

Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.

So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.

Comments
  • 7
    Theyre doing similar things where I work. They gathered us up, told us we need to come up with creative ideas for demos, tech shows, etc....

    At the end of the meeting:
    "Anybody think this isn't going to work? Don't be shy, we wanna hear from you.
    The QA department people looked at each other and one answered:
    " ...We're already backlogged, and we cant speak for the devs, but everyone seems to be busy."

    This was two months ago. Fast forward to today:
    * Number of mandatory meetings doubled for devs
    * Everyone is too busy working on the product (except for me, I get to build hardware systems, yay /s)
    * Nobody feels more creative
    * My manager shoots down project ideas.

    My conclusion: The meeting organizers meant "we want you guys to do some of of our marketing for us, and to work extra hours (for free) so that you can come up with new product ideas we can exploit. We wont bother modernizing our processes and teaching everyone how to use IT automation software in the dev lab"
  • 5
    Upper Management
  • 2
    That's pretty much how I picture it....

    PHB + EggHead
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