• He makes pie charts.
• He is a follower.
• He follows Philip around.
• He is good at suit speak.
• He tells Philip everything.
• He bonds with Philip.
• He always agrees with Philip.
• He never overtly commits to any course of action.
• He quickly scans Philip’s body language to know if he should support or undermine an idea.
• He is very secretive about his plans, actions, and motives.

I left Wollongong with the illusion that management was about seeing the big picture and making bold decisions that defined the direction of the business.  I thought upper management communicated these priorities to middle management who in turn made tactical decisions to reinforce them.  And my role as a technician was to carry out my managers plans as best I could without second guessing.  After moving to Melbourne I realised that that was utter rubbish.

In reality, upper management communicated vague generalities which they crafted so as to be deniable.  Middle management communicated back to them how successful their own tactical decisions always were.    My managers were all cowards.  That is precisely how they survived in their jobs:  Agrandise your own accomplishments, belittle your  team,  self-preservation at all costs.  Painstakingly choose the path of least risk and most conformity.   If an underling has to be thrown under a bus, so be it.

There was no longer a plain old manager in my division.  Mine wasn’t the only department missing a manager. Apparently there had been a mad scramble to grab the new titles.

We all knew a pay freeze and hiring freeze had been mandated from HQ but they neglected to mandate a title change embargo also.  I argued that some of those title changes were coming anyway.  She looked at me pitifully and quietly told me that the payroll was now 18% higher than before the financial meltdown.  The entire increase was going to those crafty ex-managers.  They had vacated their old positions so hastily they did not give a thought to their successor.  There was a power vacuum in the middle zone.

There is a history lesson here. This is how that famous gap widens – between those that know how and those that know why. You would think everyone could have stepped up a peg but that would not have worked. Everyone would have had a pay increase. Someone somewhere would smell a rat. On the other hand,  half the managers does not amount to a visible number on paper, even though the actual cost is a 18% increase in payroll.

The situation is that there is no one ready to step into the vacant manager roles. No one was being “groomed for management.”  The policy has been to keep everyone not “in the club” at arms length from any  decision-making.  The club has done very well for itself.  I wondered if this title hopping had occurred throughout the company so that those watching the budget were also in the club and had helped themselves to a new title.

Had the executives that mandated the hiring and wage freezes purposely built in  the title-change loop-hole for themselves?

The company blossomed to 11 employees: salesmen, advertising, accounting, other office staff, but no IT people. I was being called in more and more frequently. The owner said there would be a full time job for me if I was willing to work on the office PCs. I thought “Why not?” After all Windows and the desktop PC were the things of the future.  The owner then brought in Stephan Medeiros (who is no longer in IT) to maintain the office PCs.  Stepho claimed to be an MCSE on his application but it turns out he wasn’t; he was “planning on it” so he put it down anyway.  If I hadn’t been wasting so much  time in the motor trade I would have just taken the job.  So much for being a free spirit.

I had earlier informed the owner that to have any security they would need at least Windows NT on all PCs with a domain controller.  This was cheaper than the Novell offering at the time.  The software was purchased and was waiting to be installed.   Stepho bungled it. I stepped in so that people could get some work done.

I told Stepho to install the domain controller and create 3 domain admins (him, me and the owner) and 4 domain groups (accounting, sales, advertising, IT) -  the preferred Microsoft set-up at that time.  Then do all the PCs in turn and put everyone in their group.  When I came back he had made himself  the only domain admin and everyone else a local administrator and no PCs were on the domain. At the same time he had been convincing the owner that I was an idiot and that knowing UNIX was nothing like setting up a real computer.

I turned to the owner, and told him this just wasn’t going to work.  He seemed satisfied with the setup, everyone was doing their job and it was just like before.  I told him that, in that case,  purchasing NT server for the domain controller was a huge waste of money. They should not have bothered switching over from Windows95.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Stepho in the doorway gesticulating.  He was communicating with the owner and did not think I would see him.  I turned while he was rolling his eyes, shaking his head and waving his hands in a “don’t believe him” gesture. I said “This is your open door policy,  is it?”  I didn’t care one way or the other I had been paid for my work.  I found out later that people were sharing files by printing things out.  Also, in a panic,  the accounting PCs had been disconnected from the network.  For some reason the firewall was not protecting the office network and they suspected someone had hacked into one of them from the internet.  Later I commented to the owner “You should have disconnected all of them, solved the firewall problem, then hooked all the PCs back up.”

“Well Stepho said it was impossible to test and this was safe enough.”  It was only impossible if you didn’t know how to set up a firewall and set up a UNIX machine to monitor the traffic.  Stepho did not know any UNIX.  Who knows how much data had been sapped out of these PCs.  The one thing that endured unscathed in that office was the email system I had set up on Solaris for all the office users.  They were accessing it through Netscape.  When I found out about the difficulty with file sharing I told them to email documents to each other as a stop-gap measure until they got an admin who new what he was doing.

The lesson here is that Stepho lasted surprisingly long at that company, longer than I did.  He virtually managed the office infrastructure, however incompetently and destructively,  extraordinary as it sounds.  He had what it took to survive as a manager.  He had masqueraded as a tech and failed, then masqueraded as a manager and was able to endure in that role.  I am working on a theory of why this is so easy to do.

Barry