Understanding that I left the company six months ago - from a technical perspective, the work environment was outdated and chaotic. It was not unusual for it to take as long as two weeks for a new employee to gain access to a laptop, phone, and network access. It is difficult to get the proper equipment or software to accomplish your work effectively. Permission to install industry standard tools for development work required working through an IT Department that was evasive, inattentive, and mostly unavailable. There was no coherent standard for maintaining servers, and it was a mostly ad hoc configuration with half-implemented designs, leaving company technology open to penetration and misuse (which eventually happened and left the company paralyzed from Oct/Nov of 2021). From a management perspective, the most important determinant to your success within the company is how closely related you are to someone with the last name of England, either through family or social ties. Virtually everyone in a position of upper management who is not an England seems to have gotten there because of either childhood or college relationships, but outsiders rarely rise above middle management. Ironically, I found top management levels occupied by England family members who were intelligent and competent – but with few exceptions, they are surrounded by sycophants who are more concerned with maintaining their positions and salaries, than with making good management decisions. This status-quo is maintained with a culture of cheerleading and an adherence to management fads which often mask a lack of candor. The adoption of Franklin Covey’s “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” and 4DX is especially bad, more often being used to hide problems and slow the working pace, than otherwise. This was especially evident in Business Intelligence, where negative data was routinely obscured or downplayed, or just shuffled to the back of the reports. The decision to keep the BI Team as small and as fragmented as possible, and as organizationally distant from upper management as possible, also makes it extremely difficult for upper management to ask succinct and pointed questions about company and management performance without first having the real answer massaged and tweaked, and sometimes obscured with an overuse of adjacent metrics. Just two months prior to my termination, I had been given a raise, and my technical skills and leadership of the BI Team were commended. The BI Team that I managed was organizationally assigned to Finance, but we also made products for Safety, Schools, and Maintenance. As CRE was sorely underinvested in IT, the BI Team (and I as it’s manager) were often the brunt of criticism from department heads when IT failures like poor database management or poor server configuration/access would lead to missing or inaccurate KPI’s. After a particularly difficult week of IT failures, a set of KPIs weren’t properly updated and an upper management type complained to my manager. Rather than clearly identifying chronic mismanagement by IT, I was “thrown under the bus” by my own manager and reprimanded for breaking the company’s “circle of trust”. Under the guise of underperformance on my part (a lie I found particularly galling), I was given an “Employee Improvement Plan” which included such nebulous goals as getting an “atta boy” from the person that complained about me. I knew then that no matter what I did, I was out. But I still completed all outstanding projects and continued to manage my team in a professional manner. I was then quietly let go a month later. Frankly, I had seen enough and was happy to leave.
