Eh... Well, I'm having a splitting headache, and I would really love to be in agreement with you, as it takes much less energy. I went back and ran through the interview one more time, and my headache just got worse. I have worked too many years in corporate environments, and saw the way people smooth-talk their way into positions where they don't belong. Most middle-to-high management positions are decided at the golf course or other pseudo-informal circumstances, and by building around a walled garden of people using deception and manipulation. At the highest stakes, the game goes on by mergers, outsourcing, re-organizations etc. etc. but it's always just a game. That's the environment I learned to sniff out chantas. Taking other people's ideas and claiming them for themselves, claiming credit for themselves for every and any little thing then putting it in the resume in a highly inflated form. For example. And you can see the really talented people running away from teams whee there's a chanta, because they hate to do the chanta's work, hate being robbed of credit and recognition. And then you see the chanta being promoted to a higher position, or just moving horizontally to a new group or project, leaving a trail of devastation behind them but always capable of describing it as some kind of success. For example, we had this product running on Solaris, and then this chanta decided to push Linux instead (Linux is the next big thing, how can we go wrong with that, right?), and we were forced to take RHEL but to support our product it had to be heavily modified, to the extent that RedHat couldn't support it, even though we had to pay the license for support. That version was developed by a completely new group, formed and dedicated to create this very own version of RHEL. That group, of course, cost a lot of money. It produced spaghetti-code Linux but we had to use it, because chanta said so, and chanta had the ear of the higher-ups (remember, chanta's manipulative powers). Finally, our product ran like crap on the Linux setup we were initially supposed to use, so we had to get a much more expensive blade system. The Linux licenses and the more expensive blade server (even without counting the whole new Linux group) cost more per unit transaction, than the previous system which was already working. And as I said, we had to use spaghetti-Linux which was unmaintainable, either by us or the Linux group itself. This brought a lot of grief to our customers, and a lot of them canceled their contracts with us. And then chanta got promoted to a higher position, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the mess he left behind was registered as "successful Linux migration project" in his resume, and might have served as a stepping stone in his career. Together with all the starry-eyed execs he knew at the time.
I learned a lot from that experience, but I had many, many more. I just kept my eyes and ears open - that's how you learn. Some people can go through their whole corporate careers of 20+ years and be ignorant of what is really going on around them. Thinking "oh, this reorganization was really necessary? Though I thought all was fine as it is.. " without much questioning anything. I was cursed with an inquisitive mind and an innate suspicion of authority, so that helped and still helps, to see through the games.
I don't think any of this convinced you to look deeper into these corporate games and gamers, but let me ask you this: do you know any of the executives that caused great losses to their respective publicly traded companies, that have NOT found another executive position shortly after leaving those companies behind? Neither do I! Just think about this for a split second, even if you dismiss everything else I wrote, even if you dismiss what I write out of sheer gut reaction or because you don't like me personally.
