Most of my managers lambasted my teams for their emotional intelligence because we did laugh at their jokes.
Or what we thought were jokes, anyway.
In one instance, we weren't able to debug a field issue without logs. The site had generated the a binary log file that was about 5GB. For security reasons, the log could only be transferred to our secure FTP site. The problem was that the site pointed to a 300MB drive. The log was too big to be downloaded.
The customer screamed at our director, who screamed at our manager, who screamed at us. We explained that the FTP site simply didn't have the capacity to download the needed log, so there was nothing we could do.
He sprung into action to get the FTP site upgraded. While a five dollar 8GB USB drive would do the job, this was upgrading infrastructure, meaning it had to be approved by purchasing, and IT, and IS, and data security, and the CTO, and...
The customer was screaming every week for a fix, and finally, after three months of negotiations with the stakeholders, our manager held a meeting with us to proudly announce that he'd gotten approval, and budget, to upgrade the FTP site. Yay!
It would be another month before it was implemented, but we could look forward to the site capacity being almost *doubled* from 300MB to a full 500MB.
The group reacted as expected, laughing at the joke, waiting for him to tell us what the real upgrade was going to be.
The meeting minutes indicated sourly that the group did not respond "professionally" to the news of the upgrade. I guess we lacked emotional intelligence.
Quote a team member: "there's not enough facepalm in the world for this place"
I mean, if Bob isn't laughing at the boss' jokes, does he even want to work there?
This one is actually backwards.
Most of my managers lambasted my teams for their emotional intelligence because we did laugh at their jokes.
Or what we thought were jokes, anyway.
In one instance, we weren't able to debug a field issue without logs. The site had generated the a binary log file that was about 5GB. For security reasons, the log could only be transferred to our secure FTP site. The problem was that the site pointed to a 300MB drive. The log was too big to be downloaded.
The customer screamed at our director, who screamed at our manager, who screamed at us. We explained that the FTP site simply didn't have the capacity to download the needed log, so there was nothing we could do.
He sprung into action to get the FTP site upgraded. While a five dollar 8GB USB drive would do the job, this was upgrading infrastructure, meaning it had to be approved by purchasing, and IT, and IS, and data security, and the CTO, and...
The customer was screaming every week for a fix, and finally, after three months of negotiations with the stakeholders, our manager held a meeting with us to proudly announce that he'd gotten approval, and budget, to upgrade the FTP site. Yay!
It would be another month before it was implemented, but we could look forward to the site capacity being almost *doubled* from 300MB to a full 500MB.
The group reacted as expected, laughing at the joke, waiting for him to tell us what the real upgrade was going to be.
The meeting minutes indicated sourly that the group did not respond "professionally" to the news of the upgrade. I guess we lacked emotional intelligence.
Quote a team member: "there's not enough facepalm in the world for this place"