IT Management Always Blames the Worker Bees

An anonymous reader writes "A refreshing dose of sanity, It Management Fail: Always Blame the Worker Bees counters Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad, which advocates the usual reactive and punitive Big Brother measures for keeping those icky, untrustworthy IT staffers in line. Management really needs to look in the mirror when IT screws up."

Some IT Managers are Quick to...

[Stregano]

...throw employees under the bus. My boss told me I had X number of days to get a project done (X = I don't remember the days). The code needs to go through a senior developer before it hits QA. Here is the kicker: I was given this project because a senior developer did not have time to get it done. Now you may be thinking, "Well if the senior developer did not have enough time to do it, wouldn't that mean that he would not have time to go through the code?" If that is your question, the answer is, you are correct. The senior developer did not have time to look this over. What happened was that this sat at the senior developer for about 3 days with my boss yelling and getting snarky at me. I told him where the code was. No changes were required for the code. What happened was that this manager was looking to get rid of me (there are reasons that there is no need to bring up, but let me just say he pulled me into some office politics and I had never been in the situation and did not know how to handle it). and since this was a new manager, he thought he needed to fire somebody so that everybody knew who was boss (I seriously had confirmation of this with people I have kept in touch with from the company). Also, the senior developer the boss really liked. Even though the senior developer took 3 days and found nothing, I got fired from it.

What does this have to do with anything? My boss really liked the other person and did not want to tell people in a business meeting that the project was late due to him taking too long. I got thrown under the bus since according to my boss, "if it was going to take that long for the senior developer, I should have gotten my portion done in 4 days instead of the 7 I took".

Some IT managers will blame everything on the "worker bees" (even if it was the manager himself who pulled in an unrealistic due date when he personally knew how busy the senior developer was). He knew that the senior developer could not get the project done in time and needed a scape goat or whatever it is called, so it was all pinned on me. I will not say all of them, because I have had some incredible IT managers as well.

Re:sigh

[maugle]

Don't forget the ITExampleCorp that has 1500 legit copies of XP running on 1500 machines, but when the BSA come a-knockin' can't definitively prove that each machine has a valid license. Say, the machines started out OK, but over the course of business they got wiped, reinstalled, cloned, moved, repurposed, etc... There may still be 1500 licenses and 1500 machines, but that won't cut it when dealing with the BSA. In the end, ITExampleCorp is coerced into shelling out even more money to appease the BSA and be deemed "legit", even though they did nothing wrong.

So, yeah, suing a customer.