Task mastering. Ie a Focus on pumping through the JIRA tickets or equivalent as fast as possible. Meaning no time for respite or learning. Meaning lots of shitty metrics and pressure / humiliation if you don't meet them. I get a weekly report of tasks that took more than 25% over estimate within the team and names, for example. It doesn't help that anyone else can log time against my JIRA either. A three person meeting could burn up all the time.
At my company we had a good manager. Whenever we saw a problem in the systems, even a minor, low priority one, we opened a JIRA ticket for it. After all, JIRA was there for the convenience of the workers in the IT department.
Then a new manager came in. When he discovered we had JIRA, he told us he was going to use JIRA to evaluate us on how fast we fixed tickets and how many tickets we fixed.
We in the IT department maintained JIRA. That night I completely purged virtually all tickets of tasks that could not be done quickly. I put those tasks in a directory on my laptop only visible to me. From that time on, we only opened tickets for simple tasks we could do quickly. As volume counted as well, we would open multiple tickets for a multi-step task, whereas before we would have opened only one.
Eventually there were some office politics between divisions at the company and I and others were laid off (which I knew was coming, but decided to stay for the severance). When I left, the files containing all the the system flaws I had noted were erased.
Honestly, poor management aside....I cannot believe you are bragging about this. Rather than confront and address the problem, your solution was to actually delete shared knowledge?
Confront and address? You ain't gonna get your boss fired without a scratch. He's just bragging that he achieved a local maxima, and I think he's correct.
Maybe during the exit interview he could have said, "oh by the way, there's a file on my computer..."
But then he might suddenly find the severance offer is retracted.
> Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, hard earned doing things management truly values, on doing work they don't truly value – such a person can keep fighting for a long time. Some people manage to make a career out of it by persisting until management truly changes their mind and rewards them. Whatever the odds of that, the average person cannot comprehend the motivation of someone attempting such a feat.
In answer to your question: yes, I do. Just like the rest of your link states, it pays off.
I got burned on this once. I was the most senior engineer on a team and spent a lot of time coaching and reviewing the work of college hires, which meant I didn't output as many raw task points as everyone else. I was called out on it so I stopped helping as much. My task completion shot up, but team productivity and quality went down. Overall a negative.
