Derailment By Fucktard

If aliens landed, kidnapped El Jefe and left behind a ten pound sack of potatoes — or a satchel of ladybugs — to run his division, everyone would benefit. While the sack wouldn’t actually try to manage people, either, it would possess the humility (or inertia) to not intervene in affairs it didn’t understand.

We have a company newsletter that is literally concatenated input from division heads in the mega organization. Most people skip Cliff’s prosaic cheerleading introduction and go directly to the sales numbers and product status updates. These represent the health of the company.

By virtue of his being a division head, El Jefe is tasked with providing “useful information from his department.” His propensity to overreach (another story another day), combined with his being an idiot (though doesn’t know he is), and his zeal for management by spreadsheet, leads to problems.

Like this week. We are nearing the Point of No Return whereby I need to make the decision whether to initiate the process for producing widgets in December. There is obviously pressure to do it this fiscal year versus next; still, if I don’t think we’re ready, I am not going to say we’re ready. Based on a group review of the state of the product, conferring with individual sub-division managers on the team, and my own, gut intuition, I felt we should move forward. The process was started. Later that day, the company newsletter came out. Below four pages of Cliff’s rhapsodizing was El Jefe’s blurb publicly contradicting my assessment.

Needless to say, I was pissed off. I shouldn’t have to get my status updates from the company newsletter. While anyone who works with him realizes El Jefe is a boob, those who don’t might have question whether we know what the fuck we’re doing. The last thing I need to deal with is Crazy Doris reading this and going ape shit up and down the management food chain.

I conferred with PITA:

I’m reasonably certain that the all-powerful spreadsheets are to blame. This is yet another indication of how absolutely horrible he is at his job. I hope he or someone else has responded to you by now with an explanation. If you tear him a new one for the ridiculousness that is his spreadsheets, me and the rest of the minions will throw a parade in your honor every day for a week.

Sure enough, the bullshit spreadsheets were the culprit. We didn’t cross paths until later in the afternoon, by which point my blistering edge had worn off slightly. He apologized for the blindside, but offered his “logic” that this spreadsheet showing inaccurate information points to “bad input.”

I don’t have time to debug your fucking Rube Goldberg. If you are unable to provide good information, you are wasting my time and adding no value to the company.

Is he trying to be this bad? How the hell does someone so deftly terrible at managing find their way into a position like this? I feel I am watching a terrible movie all the way through only because I have a morbid curiosity at how it could possibly get worse.

There has been some idle speculation that the “lean” engineering initiative that we plan to start after the first of the year could make his position irrelevant, providing a way for him to “leave to pursue other opportunities.” In the meantime, I have secured permission to provide product updates for the newsletter.