Observations in Poor Management

Yesterday two people at the place I'm working gave notice that they'll be leaving the company. There has been a lot of turnover in the six months I've been here. Based on what I've seen, I'm not really surprised. Still, there always seems to be some head scratching by management and some longer tenured employees on why these people are leaving. Here's some of what I've seen.

• I've already mentioned the poor tooling and processes in place here - starting with Lotus Notes - so I won't rehash that here other than to mention the tooling shortfall has been brought to management's attention many times with no real action.
  
• Some people I sit near are in a constant state of emergency. Their production systems break daily (even nights and weekends) because the company's trading partners send messages that don't conform to their messaging API. Instead of rejecting these transactions, management's approach is to ignore the problem, asking employees to massage these messages (often manually) into a compliant form. This was going on before I started and I don't understand why the company doesn't choose to reject these messages. Come on! Force the trading partner to update their transmissions instead of putting these poor people through this daily hell!
• One person I sit near has openly been searching for a new job the last month. Not that I blame him, but I've never witnessed such an open job search in the workplace before. He routinely leaves during the day for interviews and constantly takes calls. I wouldn't be so offended if his work hasn't suffered, leaving the rest of the team to pick up the slack. Management is aware of both the job search and the lack of productivity which is causing delays, but I've seen no response to this behavior. I can sense the rest of the team starting to wonder why they are working so hard.
• Another team has an opening they desperately need to fill. There's a qualified person on different team who wants to apply for the position. Sounds like the perfect fit right? Not so fast. The company wrote the opening as contract-to-hire, and would force the employee to quit and reapply for the contact position! Make any sense? Not to me. When I asked about this, I got some jibber jabber about head counts, and management blah, blah, blah. Give me a break! Do what's right for the organization, the team and the individual here before you wind up losing more members of the overworked team or a qualified individual.
  

Mismanagement in this company is a problem. Management needs to put decent set of productivity tools in place, it needs to do a better job helping to foster innovation, and it needs to be more responsive and sympathetic to it's employees struggles - otherwise the brain drain will continue - and at greater pace.

*****

Quick addition to my post last month about "Silver Bullet Syndrome". I was listening to a Pragmatic Podcast this morning where Michael Nygard commented that he's sometimes suspicious of vendor solutions. Stating that they are developed by the "same" people as in house programmers with similar time constraints and pressures. The result is often a framework that exhibits similar problems to custom solutions.

He went on to say there are instances where a framework is indeed a better choice (connection pooling, caching, authentication, concurrency, etc). Often these components are battle tested implementations of well known and common technology problems that vary very little between organizations.

Well said.

My point was that... less often do well authored libraries or frameworks exist to address business problems, since these can vary greatly by organization.