I really like what someone mentioned about giving daily updates to management. Of course it is necessary for the management to be informed and to have control. However, do you think this is taken too far at Intel? It’s the part of the job I love the least because it takes away my time, frustrates me, tires me and is one of the reasons I want to quit.
10 replies (most recent on top)
Status update, sync meetings, task force all these take away valuable time from real engineering work, breeds mistrust and adds many layers of redundancy. But middle management needs those for beefing up their status reports and PPT slides.
Some d-mb people are incapable of anything else but collecting status from different engrs, putting it in a file and sending it to mgmt.
These people are mostly minorities, mostly spouses of people in high positions.
Intel absorbed this cr-p quite a bit but any company can only absorb so much.
@3xu: The survey's specific to Greg Lavender's software org. Greg is Pat's buddy from VMWare whom he pulled over to Intel to prove for the Nth time that software can only compensate that much for manufacturing process and chip design issues.
The survey's basically trying to take the org's pulse and see if anyone really cares about anything anymore. Hopefully, enough folks still do.
what is the survey about?
Stupid survey just came out. HR and management keep doing the stupid survey just make sure they checked with everyone and justify their existence. But nothing good comes out of these surveys. Frustrating!!!
@sce - "micro manage is a form of defense to make sure the reports will never climb above"
This. Just like HR, micro management is a tool to defend middle and upper management against the lower-level engineers and employees. Once layoff time comes, they will "find" something from your reports/weeklies/monthlies to justify kicking you to the curb. Management will never be accountable for their failures. This is why Intel is so fcked up.
micro manage is a form of defense to make sure the reports will never climb above
Nobody wants to be micro-managed.
It doesn't even make any sense to micro-manage as this strategy doesn't scale.
Intel, again, is a paragon of inefficiency.
Writing weeklies is always ghastly. And when required metrics change too frequently (not to mention the methods by which they are measured) never-ending learning curves cause Uber frustration. 😞
Yes that is a huge waste of time, and breeds mistrust. Unfortunately that system is too established, and will most likely never change. The way to change it is to leave the company.