I worked for a company who always positioned themselves as way more important than they were and were hellbent on micromanaging everyone. It was all about image and corporate culture. I can play that game fairly well, but I wanted to minimize my time dealing with it. I was part of a small group of 3-5 subject matter experts who rank similarly to management, but didn’t have to manage anyone. This tended to isolate us from the McJob environment as we worked things out between ourselves and all the bottom tier managers were nice to us because they wanted us to help their employees. We were salaried and unlike most jobs which use salary to make you work more hours, here salary meant I could bend my hours more than most employees and do 4x10hrs or 4x9+4hrs and leave early every Friday. Sometimes my boss would tell us to leave early for the day or take us to lunch. Sometimes we’d go out to lunch when our counterparts from a client company were around. It was an okay gig and my direct managers were okay. Covid happened and upper management could barely stand the idea of anyone working somewhere other than their watchful eye so they try to drag us SMEs back into an mostly empty office calling us “essential workers” despite us being 100% able to do our jobs from home and fully nonessential in every meaningful way. I needed the job, so I went. Around that time we got a new manager who was supposed to straighten the place out (instead doubling down on every reason the place was shit). When I arrived at our mostly empty office I let myself into the IT closet and grabbed 4-5 monitors to build myself a monitor wall. I showed up in sweatpants. I took frequent breaks. I played Tux Kart on my phone. I played songs like “take this job and shove it” over my PC speakers while I was working. We put on techno music and remixed snippets of angry customer calls to it. (QA was vibing to the tune of our rebellion!) I raced my rolling chair up and down the isles and generally acted a fool, but not enough to get fired. Our small group of SMEs was tight knit and after a few days of acting our wage, one lady quit because she had kids and there wasn’t any childcare available yet because of Covid. Our manager basically forced her into it because he would not compromise. The governor was still telling everyone to stay home. This woman straight up rage quit telling our boss exactly where he could shove it and all of us were VERY clear with our boss that he would lose the rest of us if he didn’t shape up. Of course he knew best. The bossman was a fucking self-important narcissist and tried to call our bluff only to find himself with 0 SMEs a week or two later. I went home that night and found a new job with a friend. To top it off, I was in the process of switching roles at the first company, so when I left, I imagine they felt an extra sting of having to restart that search. Their mission was “asses in seats” and they would hire anyone to meet headcount on their contracts, so whoever replaced us may not even have known how to properly turn on a computer much less fix one. One fellow SME followed a former colleague of ours who got him plugged in elsewhere. All of us found new jobs in record time. They had been driving us too hard to really document much, so when we left I assume everything collapsed back to the level of 0-experience newbies with no guidance or product knowledge at all. The company must have burned enough people because they moved most of their activity to a new city and some of it offshore where they continue their bullshit to this day. That’s what you get when you piss off nearly every qualified individual in a market! My small team of SMEs was awesome and I would absolutely work with any of them again. The comradery was top notch.
I web searched our former boss and found him on a few job sites for “high earning professionals”. He got fired a bit after we all left and I’d like to think he’s working as a grease trap cleaner now. Then again, in America we fail up.
Great to hear. I might give it a try in a limited area, like meeting people from a new hobby or friend group, then expand from there if it works f or me. I definitely see the benefit, especially for ADHD types who might otherwise forget to call someone for 1…2…3…12 months. :-D Thank you for making a cool piece of software.