This morning I wrote a hopeful email: I wrote a hopeful email to my manager, informing her of my intention to apply for a promotion and needing to solicit her advice before doing so. This afternoon I was told by her manager, a short and abrupt bully of late middle age, quite plainly and in all seriousness, that I would not be recommended for promotion.
Human resources - Error Gorilla
Career plan? Not in this place.
(via errorgorilla)
This also stinks. Read the whole thing to get the full horror, where Mister Gorilla also reminds us of the stress involved in working in his corner of the public sector.
I am often bemused by the tramlines that discussion of such gripes follows, with stuck-record sneers from private sector employees to the effect that “if you don’t like it, try working in the real world - you wouldn’t last five minutes.” Well as someone who now labours in higher education, but used to work for such red-blooded capitalists as Rupert Murdoch, I can say that such people are talking out of their arse. I have never worked as hard, or under as much stress, as I do in the public sector.
While private corporations can be stuffed with the same appalling managers and HR robots as any where else, what often serves to make public sector employment such a soul-destroying experience is the way that strategic decisions are based upon a mistaken idea of how good private sector organisations run. My own institution is an example, with a macho, managerialist, micro-managing ethos which drains, deskills and demotivates. Hearing senior managers talk is like reading some appalling 1980s textbook or watching an episode of The Office.
The Murdoch Death Star, by contrast, represented a relatively enlightened working environment where autonomy was promoted, where the right to fail was encouraged (and, incidentally, where I was paid several times to encourage Britons to slump in front of the TV what I am now paid to teach).
Enough about me. It is, surely, an indictment of any employer that they cannot appreciate the talents of one as erudite and funny as our Gorilla.
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