Nowadays at work I have managed to get into a position a little higher than before. This is normal once you acquire experience. Once you have experience, there's plenty that does not surprise you, and you have more solutions to things, so people ask you more and more and depend more on you than before.
This gives you a certain power. They say power corrupts, and well, there's some truth...it is not that it corrupts so much as that it is fun to use power. For example, knowing a second language is a great power. It allows you to expand your communications and meet new people. So it is fun to have this power. Once you have it, you want to use it.
In the IT world, depending on the complexity of the company, one of the great ways of having power is when you can influence what is being done at several levels. In the end, most IT is based on a guy somewhere doing code, and this guy usually has the ultimate power of screwing the whole thing or making it work fine. Companies should remember to treat this guy VERY well, but they don't always do.
However, apart from this guy, there's usually a big list of other people deciding on what the guy will need to do and how the code will be used. Currently I'm one of these people, and hell, it feels nice....
It feels nice to get the extra attention, to be consulted and considered. Very often in big companies your voice gets lost in the middle of the mess that they are, so it is nice to reach a position where you can be heard, even if just a little.
It is amazing to finally be able to influence monolithic things, and see them change slightly. It feels nice. And I understand that it is easy to get addicted and want more. Not only to influence, but to direct and manage.
However, of course, not all is just fun. As the movie said, power comes with responsibility. You need to use it wisely. And part of having power in a company means that you have power over other people, and choices to make. Power to have to ask someone to come on Saturday. Power to tell off someone if they did a bad job, Power to keep everyone working one extra hour because it is needed. And this part sucks, of course...
We all create a narrative in our lives. We imagine ourselves in our story, and we tell ourselves stories about it. We play parts, we follow patterns that we detect in real life.
Recently, I had a person on my team fired. Not really fired fired, but he did not pass the selection period. He did not do anything wrong. He was not someone who got upset, or complained too much, or someone lazy. He was just...not smart enough.
It would have been easier if he had been a bad person. We had one of those too, in another team, and firing him was not a problem. But this guy in my team was just not good for this job, nothing else. So in any stories, this is the part for the bastard,the bad guy, the boss that fires the innocent worker.
Life is never that simple, but still, it's a shame I had to fire him.
With power should come also a higher awareness of consequences, Anything that I needed this guy to do I would have ended up doing myself, which means I would have had double the work. I was not willing to go through that, so I made my choice.
After all, obtaining power is giving you the possibility for more choices, and some of them are the hard ones....
This gives you a certain power. They say power corrupts, and well, there's some truth...it is not that it corrupts so much as that it is fun to use power. For example, knowing a second language is a great power. It allows you to expand your communications and meet new people. So it is fun to have this power. Once you have it, you want to use it.
In the IT world, depending on the complexity of the company, one of the great ways of having power is when you can influence what is being done at several levels. In the end, most IT is based on a guy somewhere doing code, and this guy usually has the ultimate power of screwing the whole thing or making it work fine. Companies should remember to treat this guy VERY well, but they don't always do.
However, apart from this guy, there's usually a big list of other people deciding on what the guy will need to do and how the code will be used. Currently I'm one of these people, and hell, it feels nice....
It feels nice to get the extra attention, to be consulted and considered. Very often in big companies your voice gets lost in the middle of the mess that they are, so it is nice to reach a position where you can be heard, even if just a little.
It is amazing to finally be able to influence monolithic things, and see them change slightly. It feels nice. And I understand that it is easy to get addicted and want more. Not only to influence, but to direct and manage.
However, of course, not all is just fun. As the movie said, power comes with responsibility. You need to use it wisely. And part of having power in a company means that you have power over other people, and choices to make. Power to have to ask someone to come on Saturday. Power to tell off someone if they did a bad job, Power to keep everyone working one extra hour because it is needed. And this part sucks, of course...
We all create a narrative in our lives. We imagine ourselves in our story, and we tell ourselves stories about it. We play parts, we follow patterns that we detect in real life.
Recently, I had a person on my team fired. Not really fired fired, but he did not pass the selection period. He did not do anything wrong. He was not someone who got upset, or complained too much, or someone lazy. He was just...not smart enough.
It would have been easier if he had been a bad person. We had one of those too, in another team, and firing him was not a problem. But this guy in my team was just not good for this job, nothing else. So in any stories, this is the part for the bastard,the bad guy, the boss that fires the innocent worker.
Life is never that simple, but still, it's a shame I had to fire him.
With power should come also a higher awareness of consequences, Anything that I needed this guy to do I would have ended up doing myself, which means I would have had double the work. I was not willing to go through that, so I made my choice.
After all, obtaining power is giving you the possibility for more choices, and some of them are the hard ones....
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