“That Doesn’t Apply To Me”

Managers often use seniority to avoid company initiatives which would, in fairness, actually improve things.

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

I’m sure that that we’ve all been on the wrong end of the stick when it comes to management initiatives, enforced with the usual iron hand in a velvet glove, by the numerous HR enforcers that patrol the real life and virtual corridors of the modern corporate dystopia.

Sometimes those initiatives are just plain obstructive, such as quarterly performance reviews that tie up untold amounts of resources, hinder the completion of actually useful work related goals, and serve to fully alienate developers who value their technical skills over their box ticking ones.

Sometimes they’re zero effect and have little consequence, such as offering online training courses and wellbeing seminars, both of which can be safely ignored as they’re really only important to Human Resources ticking off its own SMART goals, pretending that it actually cares about the worker cogs.

But other times, management can kick off a particular initiative, push it out via Human Resources in the same way that developers do via an CI/CD pipeline, and what they thought would be the usual motivation crushing exercise in corporate compliance surprisingly turns out to be quite useful to the worker cogs, but potentially very damaging to themselves.