Journal ObviousGuy's Journal: Peer review time! 2
Well, it's the end of the working year here in Japan and since reviews are not going to happen in earnest I will go ahead and give my peer reviews here. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, but if you know me personally, there's a good chance you know who I'm reviewing.
My Manager: C
C's contribution to this company cannot be understated.
He has managed to make himself indispensable, not by becoming a leader and empowering the workforce, but by hording knowledge such that no one can pinpoint exactly what he does. He generates copious amounts of paperwork and emails which have no importance to clients and do nothing but delay actual engineering efforts. As a QA Engineer, I find myself deluged with requests to generate all manner of reports which eventually get criticized due to their lack of content, content which does not exist because too much time was wasted generating documents that customers will never see and which have no bearing on anything other than giving the impression that QA is busy.
His managerial ability is nonexistent. His unwillingness and hostility to fielding questions from customers is but one aspect of this mismatch between his abilities and the job requirements. On numerous occasions he has yelled at clients over the phone, disregarded meeting appointments with clients, and has left numerous questions emailed by customers unanswered. To make matters worse, he displays hostility to engineers who recognize this failing and contact the customer directly.
He does not work and play well with others. His arrogant attitude is always on display and the office atmosphere suffers for it. He has twice to my recollection called an engineer 'stupid' and berated the engineering teams numerous times since I began here in March. Since becoming sole PM (after convincing management about the ineptness of the other PM) almost one-third of the engineering team has quit voluntarily as a result of his actions. In addition, he seems to have developed a personal dislike for me, refusing to converse directly with me about matters which pertain to projects that I am on. As a result, I seem to always be behind the curve as I hardly ever receive team meeting notices and must hear about topics discussed after the fact in too many cases. My work has suffered because of this childish behavior on his part.
He is unrealistic in his expectations. A tight schedule is not necessarily an unreasonable schedule. However, when a project runs 4 months overdue and there is no end in sight, it is safe to assume that the initial schedule was so far off the mark that it calls into question the scheduler's ability. During the 4 months that the project is past due, we have received zero revenue from those engineers, we have in essence burned through the original profit and have burned the same amount again. Had C given the customer a more realistic schedule, this company would be making money on this project instead of losing money.
The same goes for every project that I've seen pass through this company during my employment here. Not one has finished on time except for two which I personally took charge of and completed well within the schedule proffered to the customer at the outset. Several projects have had to be cancelled because of bad scheduling or because the customer became frustrated with the lack of quality customer support they received at C's hands.
C's facile eagerness to please the customer while they are in front of him is non-existent once they are out of sight. However, what is never out of sight is his reluctance or inability to provide a buffer between the customer and the engineering teams. Rather than work with the customer to revise project schedules and expectations, he blames the project slippage on the engineers whom he then turns the heat onto to produce faster which then turns into the well known problem of slipshod work becoming another hurdle. This was especially noticeable in the 4 month overdue project where the customer was so upset that they demanded that the team members go to the customer's site and work under the customer PM's nose for 3 weeks straight. Had C deflected that frustration towards revision of the development plan, the suffering (which was not compensated for in any way) of those engineers could have been avoided.
Also, his manner of conducting meetings is questionable. As PM, it is his responsibility to lead the meeting towards fruitful discussion, but instead he hides behind his notebook computer and sits silently while the customers sit silently waiting for him to begin the discussion. When he does speak, he takes every opportunity to discuss the minutia of the project down to the addressing of registers. This is simply not necessary and could be handled via email or "taken offline" (as they say at Microsoft).
In summary, I have to say that he is a very large liability to this company. When we hear from customers how hard it is to work with this company, there is a single point of failure and it is C. It cannot be stressed enough how detrimental it is to prolong his employment.
And for now, that's the only peer review I've got in me.
Ouch! (Score:2)
just a tip (Score:1)