Ah, so it's not just software developers
Many moons ago, before I was in technology, I worked as a sheet metal workers apprentice. I remember on more than one occasion, watching the shop foreman talk to the company owner or a customer with a look on his face that anyone who has ever spent two seconds chatting with the least competent corporate VP can identify with.
It's a look that says, "I understand the words that you're saying but you clearly don't know what the hell you're talking about." There are people in virtually every industry that somehow manage to fail upwards. Maybe if you call yourself the "idea guy" enough, other people start to believe you.
Yeah, blue collar feels the pain as well.
I would like to take a moment to thank these kinds of managers for helping motivate me to save enough money that I can walk out of any job that pulls this shit instantly. The heavily casualized workforce cuts both ways baby, here's your 1 hours notice before my shift.
That's the same motivation that sent me to set up my own machine shop, so kudos there.
Boss:Hey why isn't order 69420 done?, we have to ship it by the end of the week.
Me: where is the packet?
Boss: crickets
Me: ok, where is the material?
Boss: crickets
I love the "oh we told the customer the material is on the way a month ago." When they didn't order and it's months of lead time. But I have rush?
Same thing in IT. You work on 30 different tickets, all "urgent", but then a PM DM's you that his issue takes precedence (it doesn't).
It's kind of funny in a way. Most big shops require IT to some degree because CNC machines in the last 20 years or so require networking to pull programs from the NAS. I'm not ignorant by any means in that regard and twice I've walked into the IT guy's office, noticed him trying to be clever using SSH to hang out on IRC while I walked up and pulled the plug on the switch to reset things. Both times, he freaked out but I just pointed to his EFNET chats.
As a mechanical engineer, I get asked by my management to expedite the machining just for the prototype I built to sit there unused because the person to run the experiments is too busy
Sounds like they conceptually understand that engineering time is expensive, but have absolutely no idea about the process they are managing. Kinda like they are paying for the expensive experiments so the people doing them have to have a back log so they are always overworked.
Trying to get capto systems for the multi-task lathes and zero-point pallets for the mills. I do prototyping and it's the only way to stay sane.
I wish I was in for prototyping. As is, I've specialized in non-metallic production parts (lots of power generation and medical). The few times that I can actually put my "engineer" hat on and make a prototype are few and far between, but I love it when that happens.
