We live in strange times

We live in strange times, so strange that I’m publishing a second post inside of a week after a couple of years of suffering a complete block.

In my last post I wrote that in the near future I would return to the subject of stress, and the near future has now arrived.

Let’s start with an anecdote. One of the multinationals for which I worked held an incredibly sumptuous Christmas party every year, for all of the people who worked there, including the freelancers like me. The parties were extremely well funded, taking place in some very well-heeled locations in Barcelona, with excellent food accompanied by the correct wine for each course. When arriving at the venues there were always waiters waiting with glasses of cava, after dinner trolleys with damn fine liqueurs arrived and then there was normally a disco and a free bar. The only downside was that there was always a small speech given by the CEO or DOA or some such suit. One year the speech included a homage to the positive effects of stress on the productivity of the organisation. It’s important to bear in mind that the parent company held for a long while the patent for one of the two best-selling antidepressants on the market. So obviously stress helped not the productivity of the organisation but its obscenely inflated profits.

The company ritually gave presents to its best customers, to be chosen from a list of maybe ten books. In the year of the “stress is good for us” speech, one of the books on offer dealt with the benefits of stress for individuals and their employers. Without mentioning the benefits to be harvested by selling stress-relieving antidepressants of course.

I’m now going to deviate a little from my normally laid-back self and say aloud that stress can be a good thing! Just before Christmas the TPM (see this older post) and I found ourselves with a tighter than normal deadline to implement some functionality that had enormous political implications for our project and for our company. There was some good stress, we worked extremely well, very productively and not only achieved the desired results well before the deadline but also managed to maintain our workspace free of micromanagement. After the work was complete and demonstrated to various interested and disinterested parties, the TPM and I carried out a mini-retrospective and declared that the whole couple of weeks had been enormously enjoyable.

That’s an example of “good stress”, lasting for a relatively short period, provoking excellent co-operation and resulting in a product of which we can be proud.

On the other side of the coin there is bad stress, which lasts forever, affecting us in our day-to-day lives, both within and without our working environments. I’ve had jobs, mostly contracts, which ate away at my life to the extent that I wasn’t functioning as a social human being. And almost exclusively the stress had as its progenitor an inadequate boss. In what sense “inadequate”? Let’s play “inadequate boss bingo”, just tick the ones that ring a bell with you:

1. Someone so horribly insecure that they feel the need to control every aspect of their team’s time and work;
2. A boss who is just that, a boss and not a leader;
3. A person who displays an alarming servility when talking to their superiors (I refute the idea of having superiors, there are people with fancier titles than mine, whose salaries are (inflatedly) higher than mine and who can get me fired. But in no way are they superior to me);
4. Anyone so out of their depth professionally that they feel the need to manifest their knowledge by belittling others;
5. The kind of person who asks you to have a word with a colleague who isn’t performing adequately.

I’ve only had one boss who managed to score five-out-of-five, that was at the end of the last millennium. In fact the whole organisation was incredibly sick. The CEO was famous for creating start-ups and then selling them, he carried around with him a technical whizz kid, allegedly, whose sole purpose was to make himself look good. Most of the intermediate managers were English and, with one noble exception, a bunch of self-serving imbeciles. There were three software houses working on site, producing different parts of the system, and their policy was to keep as many secrets as possible from the rest of us. To the extent that there was only printed copy of the database diagrams, in the office of the main software test team. That copy was never allowed to leave their office. As a member of the acceptance test team – which comprised me and an alcoholic incompetent – I was in a separate building and was rarely allowed (yes, allowed) to go and visit the other testers.

To increase the already obscenely high stress level, the deadline for launching the whole system was immovable and my boss became increasingly hysterical and unbalanced as the date approached. He was buying a house in Amsterdam and one day asked me to phone his carpenter to cancel some work he had planned; I responded by saying I wouldn’t do his dirty work for him. A while after he asked me to have a word with my colleague, to tell him that his work wasn’t up to scratch. I replied that I wouldn’t do his dirty work for him, neither inside nor outside the office.

The one saving grace was that all of my other co-workers were very good people, and as often happens in the face of incompetency and adversity we became very close. Which meant that we socialised a lot, spoke about the terrible work situation, and incremented the level of dissent within our group. Naturally the dissent inveigled its way into the workplace, our every success was perceived as having been achieved despite the presence of our bosses, we worked well because we trusted each other thanks to the confidences we shared and we supported each other to the bitter end. My bitter end came two days after having worked during 28 hours alongside a database administrator to recover an essential database that had been practically fubarred by the technical whizz kid.

We completed the task at around ten o’clock in the morning, at which point the CEO arrived as fresh as a daisy and told me that I looked like hell. I asked him how he expected me to look after spending 28 hours with the dba fixing a problem caused by his lap dog. That did not go down well.

I want to end on a positive note; muse #1 and I were bemoaning the fact that there are never positive news articles in the newspapers we read or on the television news. I have had some truly inspirational managers in my career. My first was when I converted from the dark side of programming to the true path of testing and she was much more a leader and mentor than boss. And a lovely person. Later on, in my last contract in England, I also had a project manager who was both likable and effective. He won the trust of his team, and our admiration for his way of treating us as intelligent people.

I think that’s what we deserve. Do you?

You’ll be pleased to know that my tales in the deposit of inadequate boss bingo have only been superficially mined, so there’s more to come!