SickChicken

They could have chosen better people!

In the running for one of the biggest problem groups of people I ran into was an IT organization. Perhaps the first most noticeable thing was that a good share of the organization was made up of two families. Both families had husband and wife working in the department, one family also had a sister and a cousin. The other just had a cousin (7 of 17 people). Interestingly, it turned out that one of the couples had actually met on the job, divorced their former spouses, and married.

This lovely group of family members probably wouldn't have been so bad, except the families had a feud going on between them, with almost daily incidents of one family complaining about the other, running to HR to report members of the other family, or things simply happening to members of one family or the other. When the first member of one family lost their job (caught misappropriating company property, after we fired him we discovered several other items which made us wish we could bring him back and fire him all over again), the other family actually cheered. Of course, when their family member was passed over for the supervisor position, they were pretty upset and threatened to leave as a group. My response was. "please feel free to go." Unfortunately they didn't.

I didn't have to wait too long though before I found one of them sabotaging the program he had been working on. Now the score was one all. This was quickly followed by trips to HR complaining that I was favoring the wrong family. But that turned to cheering as another member of the other family resigned for "personal reasons" (didn't like actually having to work, as a result of reporting to someone other than her husband). But things didn't stay static for long as one of the cheering people also decided that they didn't like working either.

By now the family situation was reduced to a workable level, and I had brought in outsiders in the mean while who diluted any influences, and so things settled down to a nice simmer with the families. But, they weren't the only issues. In the same office, I had a programmer who retired after 40 years with the company, all of it spent doing maintenance on the same COBOL program (that stayed for all of another 6 months).

This was the same place where one of my programmers had been hired, from another department from which he was being let go, because he was cute. Unfortunately for the manager who had hired him, he (the manager) didn't stay around long enough to hit on him (the "programmer", and yes the pronouns are correct). So when I arrived, here was a programmer, being paid as a programmer, who had never programmed a line in his life. Even with the spreadsheets he was working on he did no programming. Naturally, the solution here was programming classes. It turned out that he was a quick learner, and once given the chance he was earning his programmer's pay within 6 months - for the right reasons.

One of the things we did in the company was to upgrade all of the PC's from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98. Not a really big leap, especially since we did it by buying new machines and the install basically consisted of turning on the machine and answering a few questions. I had a real fun day one day when I made the comment in a meeting that we didn't need to schedule the install team into the IT department, because after all, everyone in the department should be able to set up their own PC's. An hour later, I was informed by HR that a complaint had been filed against me by a programmer manager (a 20+ year veteran of the department). The complaint was that I had said in a public meeting that she was incompetent! It turned out she didn't know how to set up a PC. I'm still not sure why.

There were other's - the Visual Basic programmer who knew nothing of programming concepts or object-oriented programming. The network engineer who couldn't program a router. The instructor who couldn't teach. But suffice it to say, the people alone made a significant contribution to the dysfunctional organization status.