Have you ever practiced strategic incompetence?

[Squisher]

Have you acted in such a way as to force management to face a crisis because you couldn't stand to see the company operate as it does? You have brought the issue up to management, but they didn't, for what ever reason, resolve it so you either acted or allowed through your inaction the issue to become a crisis.

I have often threatened to my boss to do just that, but I can't bring myself to do so.

I feel like such a wuss or even an enabler by going out of my way to "put out fires" that should never have happened if everyone else had done their job.

 

Of course.

I've let servers go unmaintained until they died.

 

[Wahsapa]

burn the place down! be sure you get your red stapler back before you do...

 

[Squisher]

Originally posted by: Wahsapa
burn the place down! be sure you get your red stapler back before you do...

Not real fires, but mini crisis that management refuses to address.

 

[Phoenix86]

You ever hear "the FAA policy is written in blood?" IE it took a plane crash to make change.

How about "it's better to ask for forgivness than permission?" There is a reason I have heard these two terms in regards to policy and procedures in corporations, mostly IT work.

If you have tried to make change, and it didn't work. Let the ship burn a little...

 

[lokiju]

No, leave the managing to the managers.


But sadly, as in most I.T. depts, the manager is a tech thats been promoted through the years and doesn't know sh!t about how to manage.

 

[Armitage]

Sometimes it's useful to follow a policy to the letter until the absurdity of what they are asking for becomes apparent.
Our security person became innundated with nigerian scam emails when she insisted that we report all foriegn contacts ... even obvious spam, to her. The policy lasted about a week.

 

[imported_Strang]

Directly and indirectly, yeah. I've consciously let things get out of hand (in a way that didn't reflect badly on me so much as the policy or method that we'd used to do certain things) to make things change. I've also f'd up a few times that caused our policies to shift (for our benefit, a few times).

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: Phoenix86
You ever hear "the FAA policy is written in blood?" IE it took a plane crash to make change.

How about "it's better to ask for forgivness than permission?" There is a reason I have heard these two terms in regards to policy and procedures in corporations, mostly IT work.

If you have tried to make change, and it didn't work. Let the ship burn a little...

Yea, I know of some things in my arena that will take a major public catastrophe to get them changed. The Columbia accident should have done it, but didn't.

 

[torpid]

I've tried and failed, or thought about trying but had too much pride in my work.

I can't tell you what does work (don't know), but I'll tell you what doesn't in terms of writing programs:

1) Complaining about a practice
2) Pointing out a problem that a "real user" hasn't had yet but which will happen soon
3) Offering reading materials from well-regarded experts about why we should do something
4) worst one ever: proving that beyond a doubt you will save money if you buy a pre-existing program rather than write your own
5) Pretending like a problem doesn't exist until it occurs in the hopes that in doing so you will force them to rethink policy
6) Spending little time to make a web site / application better looking in protest of the fact that they won't hire real designers but instead turn to hacks or YOU when you acknowledge that you suck. They don't seem to mind that it is ugly
7) Offering to spend a little time now to improve productivity - this never works because you have to be able to bill someone / something even if you are a full time employee.

What MAY work:

1) Brainwash managers
2) Stage a scene where the manager will "Accidentally overhear" a term they don't know which will result in them becoming advocates of unknown term (your eventual goal).