Entry 2426, on 2026-01-20 at 09:50:36 (Rating 4, Comments)
As most of my readers know, I work in IT, and I recently took voluntary redundancy from a job I have had for almost 40 years. I am at retirement age anyway, but I would have continued working if I hadn't been hit with yet another restructuring: I guess about the 6th time that had happened since I started.
It is fine to change the structure of an institution, group, or company, but there has to be a good reason for it, and the changes need to be focussed towards making things better for the real people the organisation exists for. The restructurings I experienced though, seemed to be driven by the personal ideology of a senior "leader", or just a bunch of idle managers trying to justify their existence.
In my case, the changes always made things worse for the actual clients I was supposed to be supporting. I'm sure they made things better for some people - most likely the management - but that really just isn't good enough. Over the last 30 years the institution has grown the number for managers by massive amounts while technical, academic, and general staff have been "let go" in large numbers.
Morale has sunk to new lows, valuable people have left, and most people see the place as being a "sinking ship" after years of perceived gross incompetence in management.
Hey, I don't work there any more so I guess I can tell those of you who don't already know that the institution in this case is the University of Otago.
I used to discuss the state of the place with many people I worked with, and the opinion amongst the academics and general staff was almost universally negative towards the management. In fact there was only one staff remember I ever spoke to who thought the reorganisations we were forced into were a good thing, and that person is now in senior management. Apparently, if you support the power hierarchy and ignore the facts you can go far in an organisation like that.
Note that I am not saying the university is uniquely bad, because any large organistion infected with the curse of rampant managerialism will have similar problems. In fact, the only other really large employer in Dunedin, the hospital, is reputed to be even worse than the university. That might explain a lot about why our health system doesn't work. I suspect the main problem there is not so much lack of funding, but overbearing and incompetent management, and many people who work there support that view, although most of them would also like more money as well!
So I am now self-employed, doing casual IT support work for the Apple users around town. Of course, I do miss many parts of my previous job, because I genuinely enjoyed working with the vast majority of people at the university, except for the managers of course, which I avoided interacting with at all costs!
For example, I almost never went to their silly meetings, which really just degenerated into a talk-fest where a bunch of self-important bureaucrats talked for an hour while saying nothing. Honestly, if I didn't know better I would say they were trying to denigrate themsleves through satire. The mindless management jargon was so unbelievably awful that it was hard not to laugh at them some times.
And I know that IT tech people also sometimes use a lot of specialised language, but when I talk to people who aren't IT experts I adjust my vocabulary to use words they will be familiar with. I suspect that if managers also did that the true vacuousness of their thoughts would quickly be revealed, because without all the gibberish there is almost nothing left.
And superficially I followed the rules while bending them to breaking point when no one was watching. Of course, I occasionally got caught doing this sort of thing, and on one occasion I had to hire a lawyer to defend me against management attacks, but they were shown to be wrong and had to pay me out for the stress and loss of reputation to me. But that made no difference to them at all: the nice thing about being a manager I guess, is you can be totally wrong and still suffer no consequences.
Some people say I am wrong to criticise managers because they can see the "big picture" which I can't. But I say there is no *the* big picture: there are many big pictures and they vary depending on your philosophical and political beliefs. No one big picture is necessarily better than any other. The management's is just one of many, and not even close to being the best, in my opinion. Yes, it's just my opinion, but one which appears to be shared by many others.
People sometimes ask why I speak so critically of the university and why I continued to work there if I disliked it to that extent, but that is (maybe deliberately) misrepresenting my view. I criticise the management because I want the university to succeed. If I didn't care, why would I have bothered make myself a target like that?
In fact, a few years back I realised that there was no way anyone could make any real difference, so what is the point in even trying. After that I still tried to do the best for my clients, despite the rules making that difficult, but I accepted that I had to work in a bureaucratic environment. You've got to understand what can be changed and what can't. There's no point in making your life harder for no good reason!
There are no comments for this entry.
You can leave comments about this using this form.
Enter name, email (optional), enter number, comment, click Add. You can leave the name blank if you want to remain anonymous. Enter your email address to receive notifications of replies. Comment should appear immediately (authorisation is inactive).
BLOG PAGE
