Management’s Favourite Accessory

When the smartest people in the room are wheeled out for show, and told to remain silent.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

Let’s just sum it all up with one quote, one which I’m about to write on my corporate lanyard of servitude.

“In case of customer visit, break glass.”

I can understand why newly minted managers, primarily the ones who go to great lengths to tout their “technical expertise” and “experience” to meeting rooms full of engineers when justifying an idiotic decision that flies in the face of both logic and cause and effect, want to get as far away from anything even remotely technical.

And, naturally, they’ll be doing this as quickly as possible — this being the only time in their entire management tenure where they’ll both make a decision quickly and execute it successfully, on time, and in budget (this costs nothing, which is something they’ll never achieve again — by design).

The main reason is, of course, is that they’ve never actually done anything more technical than press the copy button on a photocopier¹, slowly tracked a mouse cursor down the middle of the File menu to Save, or watched someone else use the office coffee machine and memorised the steps (so when the interns are unavailable to make it for them, they can have a reasonable go at doing it themselves — until someone in HR spots the pool…