(no subject)

[kradeelav]

i had two events recently where i've wondered if there's some sort of "how to corporate 101" manual, kind of like my designer's resources but across all industries? similarly also kind of like moral mazes (one of my favorite books helpfully satirizing why managers are Like That) but more about the corp as a whole versus the manager-class specifically?

one was a team meeting where the rest of the design team was understandably annoyed about the CEO pushing some quasi-unrealistic deadlines and asking our boss if he can't just tell the big daddy CEO to not do that.  afterwards, my boss was casually asking me in a 1:1 on how i thought that meeting went (i'm kind of his mole in some ways). and part of it was a genuinely quizzical look of '.... do they not understand I *can't* force the CEO to not do something he wants to do at the end of the day?"

(sadly, bro, no they don't. and that's why you're a VP and they're not.)

the other one was an incident where somebody left the company, and it *would* have been on good terms had he not let slip he was joining one of those massive conglomerates that's technically-operating-in-a-competitor-sense-but-sort-of. he immediately got hard ejected from all connections instead of the standard two weeks and a bunch of the younger team members pitched an absolute fit in (misplaced) solidarity.

and again, my boss exasperatedly had to say in a later team meeting 'you do know that's standard procedure in a corporation, right, you can't just verbally confirm you joined a competitor and expect to still have access (hint hint the way to handle that is to stay quiet until your 2 weeks are up)'

like, *I* get that because my dad was a small biz owner for ages and he filled me in on the "why" of that kind of institutional knowledge over the years but i can see how a lot of people would totally miss that knowlage, and i wish there was a pdf i could shove in some people's hands for the above situations.

Comments

[queenlua]

heh. re: the latter one: when a friend of mine quit his corpo-fresh-out-of-college job two years in, and broke the news to his boss, his boss cut him off halfway through the sentence like "hey, sorry to hear you're leaving, but i hope it's for a great opportunity somewhere else, and DO NOT TELL ME what that somewhere else is because then i would have to walk you out the door instead of letting you hang out for two more weeks!!!" very quick and good save on the boss's part lol

(i do think corpo jobs also vary on how intense they are about of sort of thing. the corpo my friend was leaving was pretty strict about this, but at my company people generally feel comfortable saying where they're headed unless they're, like, VP level or above. not sure why mine cares less but that's how it is lol)

[kradeelav]

oh god that WAS a good save on the boss's side, i wonder if he had already gone through that with a different college grad with the level of speed there lol

and you know, that last one's an interesting question... it's hard to extrapolate based on just two examples, but i feel like given the industry and where our places operate in it - the corpos that feel more insecure about NDA data genuinely making or breaking that competitive edge versus more established places that don't *need* to worry about low level data killing the golden goose. totally could be wrong tho!

[neotula]

unfortunately, it feels like that's stuff that you gotta learn the hard way. from someone telling you, or worse. there's so many things you just gotta... figure out over time.

definitely would be helpful if there was a pdf like that, lol.

[ellerean]

If there's a "how to corporate" manual, please let me read it. Middle management is awkward, in that I both oversee people and do the "on the ground" work myself. Like, I know nothing makes sense, but I don't have the power to do anything about it.

Publishing is so unlike other industries, though. We knowingly jump from company to company, and often go back to where we started. I had someone quit and was like, "good for you, you were overqualified here anyway." idk I don't think I could survive in real corporate America.

[kradeelav]

aw pftt if anything yours is far more legit than what i do. :P (you might be faintly amused to hear "boomerangs" often happen in our company too).

isn't middle management so weird? for all the ink spilled on it by grifters, there's surprisingly few resources that are available to genuinely help others figure out the lay of the land.