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The various principles of management
Today was much nicer than yesterday [1]. As I did actual work, you know, the
work that I was hired to perform—to generate software that we charge our
customers to use, I reached the que sera sera state with my “self-review” and
have decided to let it go (I can only hope that the Corporate Overlords of
the Corporation will finally accept it and not kick it back down for another
wasted day of make-busy work).
But The Process has me thinking. There's the Peter Principle [2], which
states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, and the
Dilbert Principle [3], which states that incompetent people are promoted to
management to limit the damage they can do. And then there's the Gervais
Principle [4], which is a lot harder to summarize but at first glance (of
over 30,000 words) appears to explain management machinations, but I suspect
I'm going to have to read the thing several times before I understand the
actual principle, especially given the terms used to describe three groups of
people—sociopaths, clueless, and losers—are loaded with negative connotations
(after an initial reading, I would personally use the terms realists,
idealists and cynics).
In the mean time, as far as I'm concerned, The Process is over, and I shall
not talk about it again.
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2019/01/23.1
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
[4]
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
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