Now, let’s do some math here. The median salary for this average worker is somewhere at $80K/year. Let’s pretend that he was making about that amount throughout all his 45 year of being on a work force. In real life you spend longer time earning less so you can earn more later in your career, but that would be out of the scope of 101 course.

So $80K / year times 45 years yields measly $3.6 million per entire work life of single individual. Let’s throw in some bonuses, some paid for and some non-monetary benefits (like training). Just so we can drag this number to at least $5 million. Which isn’t bad if you divide $5 million by 50 years of work – it’s $100K/year median. A salary of a well-placed manager, as far as I know.

You probably already know what I am getting at. You whole entire life you will be working for 4 times less than someone else is making per year (or per month – depending how lucky you can get).

Okay, that’s enough for today. The homework for next class – write a three page explanation why golden parachutes for CEOs benefit shareholders and workers of their respective corporations.

Class dismissed.

Put a software developer in the cubicle. Block almost all of his internet access, including developers’ forums, blogs, personal e-mail (where he may be subscribed to newsletters and newsgroups). Have him work on web application. Keep randomly block more web sites as the work progresses. Watch what happens.

Here, I’ll admit – I am neither the best nor the brightest star in the team. I constantly need to learn something new and re-address what others already know to be able to keep up with the team. Of course, I have some knowledge up my sleeve too, but in general – I know I have much to learn, I don’t mind learning and I enjoy it. I also know that 90% of my team have similar kind of catching up to do on a daily basis. Which we all cannot do, because finding an unblocked useful resource takes increasingly longer times – and we still need to get the job done.

So, what kind of bright management decision was to block access to all these resources? So that we would not spend time on personal pleasures? Or because management don’t trust us enough to let freely search the internet for the information we might need in our course of work? Or maybe because someone up the food chain all the answers to all the questions in the universe are in MSDN that is installed locally?

Couple of years ago I read an article about bank workers (and these were not the tellers – the regular office workers) who were only allowed 3 to 7 minutes of bathroom time per day, 2 minutes of walking to and from their workstations and two 15 minute lunch breaks. It was stated that efficiency increased to about 130% from the previous level. What the management usually fails to notice is that if you put a really muscled guy with a whip and a bat to force people to work, it may increase the efficiency to 200% and even 300%. But for a very short time.

Most of regulations applicable to certain company are outlined in legalese. However, most managers, who responsible for creating and/or enforcing policies aren’t really fluent in that language. More often then not they are not fluent in some of the areas where regulation applies.

For example, if you average pointy-haired boss is overseeing an accounting department, what does he know about daily e-mail backup and retention policies? Probably very little. What could happen? He may restrict the size of the mailbox available to workers in order to prevent e-mailings of large attachments. He thinks (and you can’t really blaim him for this, for little does he know) that once your mailbox is small enough the attachments won’t fit. In reality, of course, what will happen is everyone will start using personal mail boxes thus creating a security whole as large as a Google.

Next step? By order of business all e-mail providers are blocked. No Hotmail, GMail or Yahoo for you. So what would those poor souls, who didn’t quit on this step do? They would start using public shares on the network, so that they can upload a document to a network drive that is accessible to that other department and just e-mail the link to it. If you are thinking that all company will undoubtedly watch out for termination lists and budget spreadsheets appear on a public share – you got that right.

By the time the management had gone in every way possible to restrict employees from successfully doing their work, about 75% of people would already resign. Therefore there’s a cage full of new monkeys and you have to deal with all the new issues right now.

So why all the pain? Why all the suffering? There are not many possible reasons behind it.

First – few are ruining it for a larger crowd. In any group there eventually will be someone who will try to bend the rules as far as he or she can. However, management and HR must deal with those people directly, not enforce stricter policies to everyone.

Second – as shown in example above – inability to comprehend or indifference to the “tools of the trade”. If you need to dig a mine there’s very little chance you can do it fast enough using just a shovel. It often comes hand-in-hand with the idea that employees are using company’s resources for personal benefit. However, if do not restrict people’s personal e-mail addresses they will not use your company’s mail servers to send out those huge funny e-mails.

Third – when company hired you – did they do all the screening, background checks and all the other intimidating tasks of figuring who you are? Oh, they’ve even sent you to take a drug test? Good. So why, after they hire you, they suddenly stop trusting you? Have all your phone conversation recorded, all your e-mails archived, all the web site you’ve visited – listed and submitted to your supervisor? That sudden lack of trust annoys most of people, so instead of concentrating on getting job done they spend their time figuring how to circumvent the system.

There will always be one or two rogue employees that will try to push it to the limit. They are usually not the top performers nor they are the best people around. However, with all the wall pushing around, with all the restricting and humiliating, they – most likely – be the ones who stay after all reorganizations. Questions is – do you really want these people to survive?

Unfortunately, there’s a very little flexibility built into almost any corporate culture. This stems from “dog eats dog” approach everyone is taking, since it’s enough to have one asshole on the team to convert “Happy family” into “Survival of the fittiest”.

Nevertheless, I came up to the management with the idea long known from totally different area. I suggested that management (namely VP of IS and whoever is immediately underneath him, supervising software development) would create a so-called DMZ – a “de-militarized zone” for projects.

The project would be dropped into DMZ queue (as opposed to regular software development queue) if its execution would take a significantly less time is the documentation workflow is skipped. For example – updating couple of words on web site, changing an image or something similar. There will not be many of them, so it does not pose any threat of being too large to manage and growing out of proportion. On the other hand – it will free up a lot of developer’s time that could be used somewhere else.

If you are like me and mix and match working inside the corporate culture with freelancing, then this rant is old news to you. But I need to let some steam off, so here goes…

Whenever I work for a large company – and by large I mean a company that have departments led by different people, not Joe Shmoe being the director of IT and supervisor of accounting department at the same time – I can’t help by wonder why so much time, money and energy goes to waste. Thanks to bureaucracy, every good idea can go so wrong it would be doing just the opposite.

Take the company I happen to work for right now. The software development team is supposed to have decent laptops and additional 21″ LCD screens. Newcomers get their laptops pretty fast, but the request for memory and 21″ screen needs to be put separately and (I did the asking around) takes on average about 3 to 5 months. So all this time new employees are forced to work on a year model of an underpowered laptop with only one gig of memory, low performance CPU and an average hard drive. Two installed security suites, full-blown software hard drive encryption (with built-in security chip unused), bunch of software and remote management utilities running in the background being the default installation. Now add here MS Outlook 2003, couple of Internet Explorer (or Firefox) windows, MS Word or Excel – and you get a decent workstation for an average clerk. Now, on top of that let’s add Visual Studio 2005, SQL Management Studio or Enterprise Manager, maybe a feature-rich text editor (like UltraEdit) – and you get a pony trying to pull a firetruck to a fire.

Recently, I timed the bootup of this laptop (I happen to be the proud owner of one) – for all the tools to fall into place and start working properly it took from bootup (include two login/password entries – one for boot another for Windows/domain login) to being able to start typing the code in Visual Studio. It took me just under 20 minutes. That’s every day now. Talk about “wasting your time at the watercooler”, eh?