I long ago made the decision not to climb the corporate ladder just because it was there. I’m as far ‘vertically’ as I can go in my career and stay technical (not management), and I’ve been content with broadening my technical skills instead of trying to go higher. That’s the part of my career I really enjoy.
Nearly all of my frustration comes from IT-ignorant managers and MBAs fresh out school, still with runny noses and dirty diapers, who think their degrees taught them everything worth knowing about business and, by extension, IT.
Many of these ‘experts’ have never written a line of code in anything, so much as hooked up monitor or printer, or been oncall for anthing, but their egos drive them to constantly reorganize and restructure to ‘exploit economies of scale’, ‘align corporate strategies’, ‘promote synergistic coupling’, and other such Dilbert gibberish.
I have zero sympathy with these people when they ride in with all their bloated claims of past success, talking about what great opportunities they see, reorg half the department out of jobs, collect fat bonuses for generating a one-time bump in profits, and then get escorted out of the company with golden parachutes for failing to deliver in the longer term.
I know this is a little off-topic and and I apologize if it reads like a rant – I think John was asking specifically about whether otherwise well performing or highly regarded execs should be canned for so-called ‘minor’ failures of performance or character. To answere that question, I look at my own position, and I don’t feel like any of the ‘mistakes’ he illustrated would be tolerated any differently at my level – I’d be fired too, but without the extravagant exit packages all of them collected.
