The little things in corporate life

I will not talk about my work for the most part, and I certainly won't mention for whom I work. I hope everyone can respect this, and if a comment is made including that name, it will be deleted. That being said, I believe that I can quite easily talk about certain things that exist in everyone's work in a general fashion, and do a small analyzation of things that boggle my freakin mind!

As I read Sarah's note about working 6 day weeks to get vacation, and I have been notified (in the general way to the entire group, not to myself specificaly) about being to work in a given period of time and reporting time off correctly, I must consider how companies view things.

We all know that since the inception of time, people have tried to classify things in a manner that works for them. Whether or not it acctually applies to the situation, or is reasonable for a given group. In the days of lords and vassals, or pesants and dymaios (yay Nihon!), or what have you, there has been an expectation on the working class. The people that own expect the people that depend on them to provide them with some means of wallowing in their own crapulence, I mean taxes or the like. In return that king or lord or duke or CEO or whatever assumes responsibility for providing the people under their command the resources and means by which to support the kingdom or company.

Now in the days of farming, and even hunting and gathering, it was easy! There is so much required from the workers to provide for the feifdom/company. They planted and harvested. There was a fixed ammount of work there. They might build a bridge, or repair their little huts, but for the most part once you were done, you were done. Now by no means does this mean that the work was easy, short, or painless. Generally it was harder and longer, but a given known quantity.

This means of support and cycle lasted all the way up until the enception of the factory. Even plantations would still have this fixed work load, but were the beginnings of large group organized work teams. Everyone had a task, but just that task, and it was a done or not done type of thing. The modern age heralded the factory shift. Even more people doing even more things, yet still the model could hold. A person comes in, and stamps until their shift is up. A person comes in and puts together 50 hinges and goes home for the day. Some kind of given fixed goal, or a means by which to fill up that goal. Hours filled, or quotas met.

Enter the visionaries. These were those people sitting arround that were highly professional. Smiths and tinkerers in the dark ages, forgers and crafstmen in the early industrial times, and technicians and engineers and scientists in the current age. These are the people that would be hired for one of two reasons, but always had the same expectations. They would either be fixers, or makers. The fixers were hired to keep something in working order. Mend the plows, repair the machines, keep the networks up, and the like. The makers were hired to solve new challenges. We want this to stay sharper longer, stamp the part and attach it, do data and voice (to stay with the fixer example). Inevetiably these people got dragged into each other's tasks as the fixers would seek out ways to make their life easier (look at the true person behind the initial Cisco router), and the makers would be called in because they were the only ones professional enough to do it. In both cases, hey it wasn't their job, but they could do it well enough.

It then became such that these rolls got mixed up into one. People wanted to say, well if we hire just one person that can do both, we save money on these expensive professionals. Enter the maliase. The problem with this mentality is that it doesn't breed together well. People tend to be very focused one way or the other. The don't mind dabbling in either side, but when forced to do both, they are both out of their element, and pushed in ways the may not know how to go. When confonted with doing both, another thing seems to happen. The kings get ambitious. The expect the next latest greatest thing, plus the support of the current things. In some cases this works. It is a delicate balance. The fixer or the maker position is not full time. Actually it is better to say it is not FIXED time. Inspiration strikes us all in the shower, and machines break at the most inoppertune time.

However, it is not like the original times when a person could just do their job and be done. Now the kings want the fixer/makers to be there during the given time... whether something is needed or not, AND to take advantage of the outside inspiration along with dropping everything to come in and fix things. It has become a 24 hour position.

Herein lies the condrum, and the basis of this long diatribe. How, possibly, can these people be treated like those with fixed work. Initially this was to be a rant about the nature of a salried worker. It seemed to me that the nature of a fixed salary was to seriously take advantage of the worker for one of two reasons. They are intending to push serious overtime on the person, or they have such bad logistics that they can't fill their time during the normal time. The problem being that they are expected to be their during the normal time as well... or at least a fixed time.

I would think that it would be possible to give a fixer/maker a task and a reasonable time, and say go to it. If you get it done early great, do whatever spikes you, if not let's figure out why. Adjust the logistics so that they are typically engaged the time you wan (e.g. 40 hrs) and continually tweak the process. Never ever leave them there with no direction or inspiration. Yes indeed these people should be creating their own ideas that could help everyone, however they have to have an itimate knowledge of the entire system before they can do this (and at least produce anything useful, and not just be wasting time).

I have never been at a workplace where I have not seen techincal people wasting away being underutilized, getting stressed to show something for efforts that have never been set, much less worked towards. If they work on their own projects, they "Shouldn't be doing something like that on company time" and if they do nothing, they are in the same boat. These are also people that tend to get things done in record time when actually tasked and given the proper resources. They are like Sherlock Holmes just sitting there trying to occupy time with the opium pipe until the next challenging thing comes along.

This is seeming to be loosing a point, so I will stop here, and possibly go back and adjust it later. I'm hoping the idea is in there somewhere, as I am writing this stream of conciousness and my mind goes far faster than my fingers can keep up.