You Know Youre Ina Big Company When

As someone who's worked in small companies all his career, moving to a larger company produced a whole series of DilbertMoments.

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YouKnowYoureInaBigCompanyWhen...

• You need a whole group of employees just to help the engineers figure out how to use the code repository.
  • Corollary: You use a code repository that requires a whole group of experts on staff just to figure out.
  • It's based on ClearCase (which only a BigCompany? can afford...)

• You must email the repository department in order to have them label repository sources for you or create a branch.

• The hardest part of completing a task is figuring out how to do a convoluted cross-branch merge of the repository sources.
  • Corollary: Your development process is convoluted enough that such merges are necessary.

• Your manager occasionally says something silly enough to remind you that he's not staff.

• It takes 2 weeks to plan for a one-hour task.

• Your manager quashes a plan whereby person B (from another department) helps person C (from a third department) by doing something with your work-product; he quashes it, fearing that his manager might blame him if person B doesn't come through.

• The email system doesn't use standard protocols and won't work on most platforms, but it books conference rooms automatically... sometimes... until it stops for some unknown reason and forgets your appointments and you start missing meetings...
  • GroupWise, I presume? No, GroupWise runs on most platforms.
  • Uh, that would be MicrosoftExchange?. (But Exchange is cross platform; it runs on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Nt...and we have both kinds of music here. Country and Western).
    • Uh, "cross platform" refers to being able to run on many different operating systems, i.e.: *nix & MacOS & OS X & AmigaOS. The abomination you refer to as "Windows" is one single platform that promotes enough bugs with each release to make it look like different platforms.
    • I think that was the joke.
  • This can also refer to old mainframe-based mail systems.
    • However, old mainframe-based e-mail systems generally tended to work.

• You get more phone messages from MIS apologizing that email is down than you get from your significant other.

• Your external email address contains a field revealing your department, e.g., joe.blow@engineering.companyname.com rather than joe.blow@companyname.com.

• At least one very senior manager is universally acknowledged to be completely incapable of doing his job, but purely political considerations keep him there... for four more years.
  • Did you work in the Whitehouse, by chance? (-:
  • This happens in small companies too. E.g. the brother-in-law of the CEO.

• You need to submit a scanned paper form to request permission to use the company scanner.

• The CEO visits rarely, but when he does, he uses the corporate jet.

• Your boss has more people over him (i.e. his boss, his boss's boss, etc.) than under him.

• Terms such as "division," "department," "product line," and "business unit" all have official meanings within your company, and all refer to different levels within the corporate structure.

• Mergers and reorganizations of "divisions," "departments," and "business units" cause yours to change its name and level every couple of months.
  • Such changes lead to the introduction with much fanfare of new logos and mission statements for the "divisions," "departments," and "business units" concerned.
  • There are contests for employees to come up with the new logos and mission statements.
    • Hey, don't knock it. The last mission statement was laminated, and made a nice placemat for keeping my lunchtime sardine oil off pile of papers on my desk.

• There is more than one employee with the title of "president."

• There are more than two ranks of "vice president," e.g., "VP," "Executive VP," "Senior VP." (And maybe 2 is too many.)

• You are called away from actual work to have a meeting about when you should next have a meeting about "the Schedule." (cue foreboding music) Your company gets the Double Monolith MCP Bonus if this meeting includes a heated discussion about when the meetings should occur.

• You must file paperwork to declare your intent to file paperwork which declares your intent to file paperwork. Double Monolith MCP Bonus awarded if there are more levels of indirection. Remember, you need to fill that out by hand in triplicate without the benefit of carbon paper!

• You have to requisition a form, but it turns out that the form to requisition this form is obtained by requisitioning another form, which in turn requires that you submit the original form in question. (This circular dependence may seem absurd and unrealistic, but I've actually seen one in the wild.)

• Your boss's boss's boss's boss's boss works in another city and is someone whom you have never met, but he's still considered to be MiddleManagement?.
  • At my current job, I've calculated that the maximum boss nesting as a function of employees is about b(e) = log(base 1.4) (e/5). I could end up in this position if our company reaches 50 employees. I guess I should start taking management classes.

• You politely decline an invitation to attend an all-morning "we love you and want to make you feel included" shindig, at which the CEO will be presenting, and your boss's boss has a talk with your boss, who then explains to you that having real work to do is not a good enough reason not to go.

• You miss a meeting to resolve a critical production issue because it conflicts with an appointment you have with HR.
  • Corollary: HR is the most important department in the organization.
  • The critical production issue is still unresolved, and the aforementioned meeting is still going on an hour after HR is done with you.

• You must attend meetings in order to find out what you are quite capable of reading via email.

• In a normal, work-related conversation, you use the word yammerhead.

• You have to ask around to find out the names of the people who are writing the code that will interface with yours.

• "Which building?" is a common question when trying to set up a meeting or find something.

• Due to company growth, the staff is beginning to feel like sardines packed in a can; meanwhile, the company owns the vacant building across the street, which for tax reasons it can't use.
  • When the building finally does become available, internal political battles keep anyone from taking advantage of the new space.

• Three months into a project, you find out that another group is working to create a product just like the one you are creating. (They're even using the same specs!)
  • You wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which you discover everything you do is a duplication of what someone somewhere else in the organization has already worked on.
  • Then, you start poking around, and find out it's real.
  • Later you find out this is policy. There are three groups who have been given the same task. After the first or second milestone, upper management will decide which two projects get killed.

• The "MIS Department" doesn't include any programmers. The MIS staff works full-time keeping the e-mail server working, tracking down viruses, and auditing desktop computers for unauthorized files.

• The programmers and other technical workers have to maintain their own network separate from the MIS-sanctioned corporate network.
  • OMG! We HaveThisPattern - or possibly HaveThisAntiPattern.
  • At the company I work, there was once three separate IT fiefdoms: One that supported basic email and other productivity apps (Word, etc.), one that supported engineers and their tools, and one that supported the finance/accounting department. (This insanity has since been reeled in). (In at least one other company, it hasn't)
    • ... it actually makes sense to have separate fiefdoms, and finance and accounting are themselves separate

• Getting approval to purchase a $3000 laptop is no more difficult than getting approval to buy a $10 stapler.
  • Corollary: Getting approval to spend $10 is as difficult as getting approval to spend $3000.
    • Getting approval to spend $10 is more difficult then getting $1.5 Mio for a compute server.
    • The cost of the requestion process is far greater than the cost of the requested items.

• The company's web site lists dozens of locations, and yours is not included.

• It's easier to call in to your company's main business line and ask the operator to connect you to a co-worker than it is to look up that co-worker's extension in the internal directory.

• You get sent an email telling you that all logins must be configured to have the company intranet as their home page.
  • I'm hoping they don't find out about MozillaFirefox or the OperaBrowser; otherwise, we can convince them that they've won. If they do find Firefox and Opera, they'll probably just ban them.
  • Next I'm expecting them to tell me what "My Favorites" must be.
    • Fine, let them tell us what "My Favorites" must be, just as long as they don't start defining my Bookmarks!
  • Your company has built its own update and consitency check application. It is mandatory and rewrites your browser hompage and start menu on every boot.

• The MIS staff see all Java applications as a time sink to be avoided, despite the fact that J2EE applications account for most of the company's revenue.
  • ... and developers are told to take time out to write Swing applications to hide the command lines, so MIS won't get freaked out... until something goes wrong, and we actually need support from the support staff.

• TpsReports are a real part of your day.

• The MIS department panics because you begin testing the network app you're developing, and they can't figure out where the rogue packets are coming from.
  • Our IT department, in an apparent attempt to thwart viruses, worms, and other forms of malware, has blocked ICMP packets from passing through the corporate routers. In other words, "ping" no longer works on the intranet. Perhaps that is a legitimate security practice, but it strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

• While searching for a network switch, you're struck with a odd sense of familiarity... from a Doom map.

• You have an entire bookshelf dedicated to manuals on corporate operations, policies, and procedures.
  • And those just cover your department.
  • And they are cascading, every layer of hirarchy adds new policies to the one made by the uper layer.

• You have a full-time employee whose only job is to answer questions about the org chart.
  • Shell Oil used to have two full time employees whose only job was to answer questions on the organization chart. -- AndrewCates

• You are required to add a "For the recipient's eyes only; please delete if this is not for you" tag to the end of every email, even if the legal benefits of something like that are dubious.
  • Such text is added automatically to every email by the mail server.

• You are required to change your password every few weeks even if this has been proved to decrease security.
  • And the password requirements are kept secret! Spend the next hour guessing at passwords that might be acceptable. When one is finally accepted, realize you forgot what you just typed. Proceed to comments on Trouble Tickets.

• All other network access is blocked except for the Web, if you are lucky.

• You are forbidden to use Linux desktops even if practically all the work you do is UNIX development on a remote machine. No rational reason for this is given beyond "company policy."
  • The UNIX development server is in a different continent.
    • It takes 2 seconds for a character to appear because of the latency (real story).

• SAP is brought in to make everything more efficient and everything becomes more difficult.

• Hourly employees work slightly staggered shifts (8:10 to 5:10 for one department, 8:20 to 5:20 for another) so everyone doesn't rush to the parking lot at once. Especially true if the office is located in a skyscraper.
  • The company parking lot entrance has its own traffic signals.
  • The company parking lot entrance has its own rush-hour lanes (different directions in morning and evening) and car pool lanes.
  • There is an exit from the freeway whose primary (or sole) purpose is getting traffic to/from the office. Daimler Chrysler's engineering complex in Auburn Hills, MI, USA has one.
  • There is a freeway whose primary (or sole) purpose is getting traffic to/from the office. (Some auto plants in the US have this distinction).
  • Or a transit stop (especially for a subway, commuter rail, or LRT station - bus stops don't count).
  • The street in front of plant is named after the company.
  • The tram stop is named after the company.
  • The plant is served by two tram lanes with different routes and tram stops.

• Your company has a skyscraper named after it, or even several, in different cities.
  • Your company has a basketball/hockey arena or football/baseball stadium named after it. (AmericanCulturalAssumption: It is common for pro sports teams and even universities to sell the naming rights to athletic facilities to large companies. The Houston Astros baseball team, for example, used to play in Enron Field, now renamed Minute Maid Park, after the beverage company. This practice is by no means limited to the Americas. Nearly all the big rugby stadiums and cricket parks in Australia and New Zealand have sponsors' names.

• Generating and closing trouble tickets is more important than solving the problems.
  • Generating and closing trouble tickets is more difficult than solving the problems.
    • Gee, my company finally is more efficient at something! We are able to open and close dozens of trouble tickets before the problem ever gets solved.

• Your manager's primary responsibility is getting time cards filled out and turned in. Accomplishing something is secondary.

• You spend 90% of your time navigating or working around bureaucracy and 10% doing real work.

• Your managers fly into town for a release party, but bring with them someone from human resources to close the office and lay everyone off.
  • And your reward for finishing the project early is getting your pink slip early.
  • And you're not even invited to the party!

• The district manager comes into town to organize a "morale building meeting" (without pay - on most people's day off), then spends the first twenty minutes chastising everyone for looking grumpy.
  • Curious: What would happen if you did not attend? You would be "right-sized"

• Microsoft is willing to negotiate to get your business.
  • Your company holds patents that Microsoft wants to trade for some of its patents.

• Company uses a document management system that nobody likes and is slow, but the company keeps because it got a bulk deal on it. People avoid changes simply to avoid having to deal with the evil document manager. It's only purpose is to satisfy "quality certifiers," because nobody internally wants to use it. People use SneakerNet and other means to share documents.
  • Much of the infrastructure surrounding the document management system is maintained by some junior IT programmer who couldn't code his way out of a bag.
  • To much fanfare, the company announces the retirement of the evil document system - and deploys one which, to the astonishment of all (who didn't think such was possible), is far far worse. Even after the transition bugs are somewhat worked out and people are used to the new tool, employees pine over the "good old days" when the old tool robbed far less productivity. (Where I work, we HaveThisAntiPattern)
  • The "official" document management system is so bad that the actual document management system is an ElectronicPickleJar
    • Part of the preparation for an ISO-9000 audit is quickly moving all of the content out of the ElectronicPickleJar into the "official" document management tool so that the auditor will find it in the correct place.
  • There are several "official" document management systems that are all so bad (and the instructions about what document goes into which system so bad) that everyone (even some non-programmers) actually put their documents in the code repository.
    • ClearCase licenses are purchased for managers, marketing, other non-programmers so documents can be stored in Clearcase rather than the official repository.

• There are employees whose sole purpose is to type information from one system to another

• You suddenly realize you are posting Dilbert cartoons not because you think they're funny, but because you identify with them.
  • You suddenly realize you've begun posting printouts of Wiki pages instead of Dilbert cartoons.
  • You begin to wonder just where, exactly, ScottAdams has placed that digital video camera because the latest series in the newspaper is about your project. (This has happened to me on no fewer than three occasions.)

• You stamp everything "DRAFT" to cover your ass.
  • Whenever you have a spark of inspiration, your first thought is Is this idea really worth fighting for?
  • You decide it isn't.
  • And when the project fails, at least it wasn't your fault.

• Your company has a site or facility (a building on a larger campus doesn't count) whose sole purpose is administration and/or management (i.e. no sales, R&D, manufacturing, or customer service functions at the facility - internal support functions like the IT department, as well as support roles like secretaries, custodians, cafeteria cooks, and the like don't count). Boeing is a classic example - having built a new corporate headquarters in Chicago - in a location intentionally remote from any of its three divisions (commercial aviation, military aviation, and aerospace).
  • There are multiple such facilities in the company

• You have to drop bread crumbs to find your way back to your cubicle after taking a piss.
  • You have to eat somebody else's bread crumbs because you've been lost too long, causing them to also get lost.

• The building is so large that cell phones don't work inside.
  • Or else, the building includes cell phone repeaters.

• You have to use something like MS-Access to manage your CC: list.

• Empowerment means, at each step, you get to choose whether to attack the person on your left or your right as you progress forward.

• You try to locate a machine on your floor and eventually work out that it is in a separate building altogether.

• Two PCs sitting next to each other on the floor are on different subnets and go through so many switches that copying files from one to the other takes hours rather than minutes.
  • SneakerNet is used to bypass obstacles (intentionally or otherwise) in the networking architecture
    • Company issues policies against using portable media to share files between devices.

• You're sending a mail in Outlook and your company address book returns 30 matches for your recipient, most of which aren't even on the same continent.

• Name-based logins: you have an uncommon name but your login still requires a '7' appended to it to disambiguate yours from all the others.
  • Bonus points: After you leave and later rejoin the company, there's no procedure for reactivating your old login, so you get a new login with a number appended to disambiguate you from yourself. True story.

• You wander around the office for 10 minutes before realizing you got off the lift on the wrong floor, yet everything looks just the same.
  • Even the people working there.

• See this nice big mainframe? We can't use it yet, because first we have to sue D*gital for leasing it to us. But we plan to start using it next quarter... (true!)

• You attend three different company holiday parties: one for the corporation, one for your department, and one for your group.
  • For the annual summer cook-out, the company rents out an entire country club, theme park, or similar facility.
    • The company owns the facility.

• You idly mention to your ProjectManager you intend to write a one-line script to solve some problem, and it gets put on your project schedule, demanding regular status updates and change management reports.
  • You present a DesignReview for some (sub)system, and in the design review you describe the components of the system. Each component so described gets put on your project schedule, demanding regular status updates and change management reports.

• The street you turn into is named the same as your company.
  • The street you turn into is owned by your company.
  • Company has its own zipcode (true story)
  • It's further from the factory gate to your building than it is from your home to the gate, even though you live in a different town (true story)
    • TheSimpsons citation: Homer commutes thru a long traffic jam and parks at the end of the lot - across a chain-link fence from his own back yard...

• It takes three or four times the effort to go through the process of shipping a product than went into developing the product in the first place.
  • Or takes 2 months to develop and three and a half years and counting to ship, and is passed off to 3 different project managers in the process.

• Your ProjectManager maintains two schedules, one to keep track of what the engineers are working on, and the other to show to management.
  • And they are both wrong.

• The QA department files 50 bugs on your product, one for each test that failed, because the component they tested wasn't integrated yet. And this drives everyone into a tizzy because the bug count is too high now.
  • corollary: You get in trouble for using TestDrivenDevelopment because the QA department can't meet their bug quota

• The company has a program to save money by reducing the number of network ports per cube/office to one, forcing everybody who has more than one machine (for example, a desktop and a laptop) to get mini-hubs.

• The company has an IT department which has a policy to ban minihubs to force user departments to pay money for more network ports.

• Engineers above a certain rank or pay grade spend more time creating slide presentations than working on code. {Shouldn't this be YouKnowYoureInaBleepedCompanyWhen?}

• Every time you have a meeting with someone from another "department," your manager feels he needs to attend.

• You have a 'Policy on Policies' (true story)

• Matters get escalated to the Escalation Department for further escalation. (Microsoft)

• There's an IT group dedicated to testing new hardware/software for department-wide deployment. By the time their recommendation is approved by senior management, the tested product has been discontinued. (true story, though government, not company)
  • I've encountered this also. They were trying to arrange an "equal or greater performance" approval system to better handle it because it became an epidemic.

• Your department pays rent to a department who "owns" the buildings.

• Your department pays for every megabyte storage used on the central file servers to the IT department.
  • Storing data on your machine or static storage is forbiden.

• Your deparment pays for every entry in the ClearCase database to the konfiguration managment and IT department.

• The only thing that gets processed fast is budget cancellations.

• The TRS-80 that your predecessor ordered in 1983 finally arrives at your desk.

• Microsoft Word crashes because the quantity of acronyms on your report overwhelmed the spellcheck.

• Your company leases out their parking lot to the city for concert events because it's bigger than the one by the stadium.

• Your company has a stadium on-campus (Blackbaud Technologies is one of these, but mainly because the founder was a soccer nut [is there any other kind?]. The company also sponsors two soccer teams, including one that plays on a semi-professional level)

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Contributors: TimKing, numerous AnonymousDonors

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See: YouKnowYoureInaWildWestCompanyWhen, YouKnowYoureInaBleepedCompanyWhen, ManagementByObjectives

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MayZeroSeven

CategoryHumor, CategoryAntiPattern