TheGarage Tech Blog

Over the past couple of decades I’ve done work for American General, Valic, and recently AIG — all the same company with different names — at the Allen Parkway compound in Houston. Over those same decades, I’ve also done major project work for Shell Oil, Enron, Houston Industries, McKinsey & Company, Honeywell, and Sysco Foods as well as several other very large corporations.

Granted in ponds as big as these are/were, I was just a microscopic organism, much like this blog in TTLB ecosystem, but that experience provided a unique look into the workings of mega super large corporations. Trust me, it ain’t pretty. If it wasn’t for the way they waste money, I would never work for a big corporation.

My first gig as an independent consultant was at Shell where I coined one of my favorite sayings. As I would watch, day after day, the decisions and operations of mid level management all I could do was shake my head and say, “Boy howdy they must have plenty of oil” because these were some of the stupidest, self-centered individuals I have ever seen. Wasting a few hundred thousand dollars on dubious projects was an every day occurrence. No decision can be made on merit alone. Every action taken must be of some benefit to the decision maker first, company second, or third. I think there is a code between mid-managers: You don’t point out how stupid I am and I won’t point out how stupid you are. Debbie Ewart, I hope you are reading this.

One of the last big corporations I did work for was AIG back in 2006. They only had a small bit of work, about three months and maybe some more after that. What they had was several web applications that were built using disparate technology platforms. A couple were in Coldfusion, a couple were running on IIS active server pages, and a couple were built using Apache/PHP. So they wanted these web application to look exactly the same and work exactly the same but they wanted to move them all over to a common web technology, in this case IBM Lotus Domino.

AIG figured three months for the work. In three weeks I was finished with three of the six applications and was sitting around twirling my thumbs waiting for these idiots in New York, who used to maintain the applications and were unhappy about losing them I guess because they would not do one freaking thing to test and move the completed applications into production. When I finished with the third one, they had not even started looking at the first one, nor could I get timely responses to requests for resources I needed to start on the fourth application. My guess is that they were sticking it to the guys who hired me for yanking their apps from them.

As an hourly professional worker, if not kept busy, I may just disappear for the day. I can only soak up so many hours sitting around reading the Internets. One day when these Mo’s I was working for snapped their fingers and I wasn’t there, they got all pissy like they are the only people in the world and I had better learn my place and be ready for when they snap. Well, that’s not a good attitude to take with any highly educated, highly experienced professional and certainly not this one. I was especially offended since I had only been there three weeks and was already three weeks ahead of their schedule. Most normal people spending money from their own pocket would be quite pleased with such progress.

Here is the setup. Unknown to me Steve and his boss Tom went to New York for meetings. Obviously at one of those meetings the topic of the web application conversions came up and Tom tells Steve to call me for an update. As I said I didn’t know they went to New York and had been sitting around with nothing to do for two days and consequently was unavailable when Stevo called. I think I left early to go see my father in the hospital, as he was dying a slow painful death at the time.

So I get this nasty email from Steve shifting his failure over to me, questioning my professionalism and blaming his inability to get an instant update from me as the cause for any problems with the conversions, to which I do not take kindly. His chastisement was of course copied to the entire chain of command, as was my reply.

Steve,

You wasted more time on this email I suppose than you did calling me last
week. I reckon I wasted more time walking over to your cube to give you
updates on Wednesday and Thursday and to see what alternatives there might
be to using the funky Intelleprint than you did trying to call me on the
phone. Had I known everybody was unavailable I would not have wasted my
time.

By the way, nobody ever bothered to show me how to access the phone system.

I find it very interesting that you spend your valuable email time
bird-dogging my lack of at-a-moment’s-notice availability yet take no time
to discuss the actual status of any of the projects that have ground to a
halt due to the lack of attention from AIG people.

It would appear that our “professional” relationship here is not a good
fit.

If you would like to come over and see where I am at on the certificate
printing before I head out, I will wait around for a bit. Otherwise, I
think I am at a good stopping point.

Regards

In fairness and full disclosure Steve did send me an email later with a half-assed apology to which I responded with an apology of my own for being such an ass as I am usually much more professional when I tell someone to shove it where the sun don’t shine. As a self-employed professional I can and do put up with a lot of crap, a whole lot, but I do have my limits.

The whole point behind telling this story is not to show what an asshole I am, but to illustrate how these mid- to low-level peons put their personal ego ahead of the work. Instead of getting three months work in half the time they opted to go a “different route” that doesn’t involve the guy who inadvertently shined a light on their inability to manage a simple application conversion. All they had to do was to treat me like a human being and let me work and they would have got way more value than they had bargained for but they would rather spend four times the money so they can feel more secure in their little spot on the org chart.

My experience shows this pattern is repeated over and over again every day in every big corporation. It’s pathetic. When there is plenty of oil, I guess it’s not a problem. But eventually, in slim times, the market always gets it’s pound of flesh for these types of inefficiencies. Since Shell Oil is sitting pretty right now, there could be no better example of this problem than AIG.