I've had this happen many times. Often, it was escalated to director and/or VP levels.
The record was, I believe:
- dozens, if not hundreds of verbal reminders
- 84 emails from team members
- 10 emails to the department head, who said "schedule a meeting to discuss"
- 17 meetings scheduled with department head (13 were cancelled by him, the other 4 he didn't attend)
- 49 biweekly project meeting minutes listed the issue as "high priority"
- 18 project Jiras (17 listed as duplicates of the first, which was still in "pending assignment" status)
- 6 SpeakUps (5 listed as duplicates, the first assigned to a person who'd left the company)
In the meeting the VP sat in disbelief as the manager and department head admitted that neither of them read emails, attended project meetings, or read meeting minutes from the meetings they'd skipped. "What exactly do you DO, then?", he asked.
Their attempts to blame the critical issue (which had been building for over two years) on the engineering staff were... not successful.
Presumably they were too busy reading emails coming down from on high and attending meetings with each other. At least that’s what I guess my management do.
Oh, yes. This was a company that LIVED in emails and meetings. They analyzed, and analyzed, and analyzed, and analyzed why things weren't working, but they never actually DID anything.
If you sat a manager's desk and saw his email, you'd routinely see their unread email counts were in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. If you have six thousand unread emails, you have a problem.
They lived completely in magical thinking. As one engineer noticed, when they lowered estimates, they considered that to be saving money. So of course, they bullied the engineers to lower estimates as much as possible, and many flat out refused to accept estimates that exceeded the budget.
The fact that the engineers were almost always right was not an issue. The accountants said that we were getting $10K for this function, so an estimate of $12K to develop it unacceptable. Why must you engineers always be so difficult?
Not surprisingly, it was the PMs and managers who'd come from other companies that were the most reasonable. The lifers who'd been with the company for their entire lives simply accepted management decrees as the word of God, and acted accordingly.
Five emails? Pfft.
I've had this happen many times. Often, it was escalated to director and/or VP levels.
The record was, I believe:
- dozens, if not hundreds of verbal reminders
- 84 emails from team members
- 10 emails to the department head, who said "schedule a meeting to discuss"
- 17 meetings scheduled with department head (13 were cancelled by him, the other 4 he didn't attend)
- 49 biweekly project meeting minutes listed the issue as "high priority"
- 18 project Jiras (17 listed as duplicates of the first, which was still in "pending assignment" status)
- 6 SpeakUps (5 listed as duplicates, the first assigned to a person who'd left the company)
In the meeting the VP sat in disbelief as the manager and department head admitted that neither of them read emails, attended project meetings, or read meeting minutes from the meetings they'd skipped. "What exactly do you DO, then?", he asked.
Their attempts to blame the critical issue (which had been building for over two years) on the engineering staff were... not successful.
Presumably they were too busy reading emails coming down from on high and attending meetings with each other. At least that’s what I guess my management do.
Oh, yes. This was a company that LIVED in emails and meetings. They analyzed, and analyzed, and analyzed, and analyzed why things weren't working, but they never actually DID anything.
If you sat a manager's desk and saw his email, you'd routinely see their unread email counts were in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. If you have six thousand unread emails, you have a problem.
They lived completely in magical thinking. As one engineer noticed, when they lowered estimates, they considered that to be saving money. So of course, they bullied the engineers to lower estimates as much as possible, and many flat out refused to accept estimates that exceeded the budget.
The fact that the engineers were almost always right was not an issue. The accountants said that we were getting $10K for this function, so an estimate of $12K to develop it unacceptable. Why must you engineers always be so difficult?
Not surprisingly, it was the PMs and managers who'd come from other companies that were the most reasonable. The lifers who'd been with the company for their entire lives simply accepted management decrees as the word of God, and acted accordingly.
Save receipts as often as you save your work. Preferably in several locations.
But the receipts don't lie … 😏
I'm so glad I have years of emails.
Check out this for hints on gaslighting colleagues regarding email receipts.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v0mwT3DkG4w