Workplace Rant: The Epidemic of Management per URLs

It turns out (referring back to the previous blog post) that I most definitely did not get my manager into trouble, which is good. That said, I had asked for feedback from the head of HR and I got it.

While it was said in a friendly and empathetic manner, I'm experiencing the usual post-feedback crushed feeling.

One piece of feedback is that I write overly long messages, to overly large audiences, and don't just run ideas by individual people whom I trust first ... And some of these messages are totally irrelevant or unimportant.

Anyway, c'est la vie. I also received lots of other advice (a good one was to make sure that my team is an early adopter of new technologies, since apparently we put a colleague through hell when we set up our new laptops at the last moment). And I gained an insight into some of the challenges of HR, which are steep.

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I was fairly zen for most of the week until certain developments during the course of today, which were genuinely piffling but rekindled my irritation.

For example: It drives me absolutely bonkers that sending links to articles and videos is now the band-aid for every wound in the company.

I don't dislike all of the links and, because the wellbeing of my team is more important than my irritation and I am on the lookout for ways to serve it better, I always save the links for when 1. I am not too busy (a.k.a. overtime) and 2. the bile in my throat and/or feeling of disappointment at getting another gosh-darned link has subsided. I've shared a few myself. But:

Firstly, I still have the very unsettling feeling that a few other people and I are in the situation of Marge Simpson, going through an obstacle course when she was in a fictional police training academy in The Simpsons: she struggled to climb over a tall brick wall, while all of her fellow trainees were walking through a door in the middle of it. The more you try to really fulfill your professional duty instead of finding shortcuts, the worse you suffer.

Secondly, these links are really not that helpful. Rather than giving actual practical help ... here's an article! Rather than carefully listen, observe, experiment, and learn from the context of our company and especially test it on yourself before recommending to others ... here's an article! Rather than have relevant personal experience ... here's an article!

Also: struggling to have enough time to do your work, help your team, and acquire additional skills? Here's an article ... that will take up 5 to (especially if it's several nested articles in one) 50 more minutes of your time! ....... It really makes one despair.