Life Imitating Dilbert
I'm having a nearly endless series of Dilbert moments over here at your neighborhood technology monolith. I can say a ton of positive things about working here, I really can. I can also see why Scott Adams speaks to so many people's vocational hearts.
We had a two-day meeting this week that involved taking a brain dominance assessment with a shrink as a prerequisite. (As a general rule I only want to be talking to a shrink in those special instances where a court order or my intense disdain for people who have return receipts turned on by default are involved.)
There were parts of the meeting where a plastic model brain was circulated among the participants. (This just in: the brain is pretty well engineered!)
There was a nice retro tech angle: the shrink facilitator leading the meeting didn't rock the PowerPoint like the rest of the new millenium. Overhead. Transparencies. Graphics straight out of 1987. Extremely hot. It was like the Carver amp of presentations. Very Tuftian except without the inherently genius content.
There were no ropes courses or trust falls. There were serial exercises involving describing your current feelings in a single word. I wish I had thought of doing mine as a distributed haiku at the onset.
I don't know that you readily see systems and solutions this large unless you work at a very large company like this one. From that perspective working here has been amazing. I've worked through the insides of the systems and teams that drive some of the largest financial institutions and that's been unbelievable. I've really relished that aspect of things.
That said, the rest of things are somewhat more predictable.