Sometimes, the System Will Save You

My first, and obvious, tactic was to avoid a frontal assault. I needed to find some clever feint, like the tactics used by all those famous generals in wars past to surprise and then decisively defeat the enemym But I was only a private, and the strategy for victory eluded me. So I bided my time and hoped for help. I had evaluated my war assets and liabilities, as well as my opponent s, and I determined that my manager had more firepower than I did and that I had best wait for help while trying to survive as best I could.

Then one day the branch office mailbox of every employee held a notice of the annual IBM employee evaluations. Each year, IBM formally evaluated every employee, and the employee evaluated his manager, his managers manager, and the IBM corporate office.

For the first time I sensed a whiff of unease in my manager when he saw me. My SE buddies seemed to pick that up also as we discussed the general conditions in the office this year compared with those in the office at this time in previous years .

We all were formally evaluated. We filled out our evaluations of management, and off they went, as always, to IBM Corporate in Armonk, New York, for analysis.

Somewhere in the sea of employees positive evaluations of management there must have been at least one red flag that popped out in Armonk. For soon afterward, an emissary from the corporate office unexpectedly showed up at our branch, asking the way to the branch managers and my managers offices. Several weeks after that, our bad manager had silently stolen away.

We programmers had won the war with only one remote ally, partly because of our good reputations and proven contributions to IBM, but mostly because of IBM itself. The company had implemented checks and balances for just that sort of situation; when given the needed information, IBM took the needed corrective action.

My advice to you? Look for avenues within your company to air your grievances. You never know what might happen.