NP: The Hives, Veni, Vidi, Vicious

I was dispense with diplomacy and pretense and just call this post "why I hate my job," but that seems like too drastic of a change in tone for me. That being the case, I think I figured out the core of why I hate my job about halfway through my ten-day weekend, and once it hit me yesterday morning at about 6:30am, it stuck with me to the point where I couldn't get back to sleep.

It's actually pretty simple. I'm being asked -- more like told -- not to think. I'm being told simply to do. Everything is getting slotted into pre-defined tasks with plans and processes and deadlines and an increasing amount of bullshit that contributes nothing to the actual quality of the work, and even inhibits it. Projects that used to require free-form insights and analytical creativity turned into rote recitation of facts that beg for explanation and get none, because those explanations fall outside of the pre-defined "modules." And the defining of those modules was done counter to the body of work, in that it included metrics that had been previously omitted because they were problematic. Which, in turn, completely bit us in the ass.

This is one of two reasons that the department I find myself in seems headed almost entirely in the wrong direction. The other is that I am in an industry that sits on a huge amount of data, and when clients in this industry ask for us to be more strategic, there is a context for that request that must include that huge amount of data. Only the people driving this notion of strategy seem further and further removed from the data, so they think in fuzzy terms about overall marketing efforts, when we, as a company, have little to do with anything outside our own slice of the digital domain.

Despite all the wringing of hands over what "strategy" means to our clients, I don't think we ever actually asked them. I actually worked peripherally on a project for two or three months where we developed our analytical "product" without ever getting feedback from the internal people who both talk to the client most often and would have to implement the results of the analysis. Once I got more heavily involved, I took it to the day-to-day teams and was able to make a lot of progress in a short time once we included that feedback. But it seems like nobody even thought of that before.

There's a dangerous mentality brewing where a bunch of worker drones execute on poorly informed, out-of-touch ideas that are brought down to us from the mountain. There's probably a comeuppance at the end of the road, as we try to exact a price for these out-of-touch and thought-free efforts from clients and get summarily laughed at, but the time horizon for being proven right on this is even longer than that of the notion that Google will make everything alright.

I guess the upside is there's really only one way to fix this, and that is to walk away. To change the direction of an entire department when it has been shown repeatedly and rather emphatically that my thoughts, opinions and experience about the business have no value whatsoever would be futile. The only question is when, and if staying until the acquisition goes through is a counterintuitive way of leaving. But the course is pretty much set.