Workplace Mobbing: Autodidact Alert
Regarding your article "Facing the Mob (Comment, Oct. 2004): In my 17-year career, I've personally witnessed (and been a victim of) the "mobbing phenomenon. Three things of merit that I don't believe you mentioned:
- There are a lot of technical professionals without formal education related to their job. These are most of the people who do the mobbing, primarily because they're ignorant of methods that can make them more productive. When put next to a technically excellent individual, they feel threatened or simply have no appreciation for work that involves deep thought processes before taking action. Instead, they approach each problem in an ad hoc fashion, thus creating their own long-term job security since they'll be fixing deficiencies in their work for years to come. This leads to my second point.
- Management often can't distinguish real professionals from impostors, but when given a choice, the ad hoc approach generally wins because it's never completely thought through and hence is always presented as taking less time and resources—an appealing recipe to the uninitiated manager or executive.
- My last point speaks to the "geek/non-geek transition. There are technical people with very good social skills. However, it's basically a maturing process. Immature geeks scorn those they consider to be no longer technically adept, and underestimate the value of emotional intelligence.
The corporate environment is generally the most susceptible to workplace mobbing. People are more political and less concerned about doing the right thing when there's less of a personal investment, as is the case in large companies.
Dana Heath
Software R&D Manager
Protein Function Division
Bio-Rad Laboratories Life Sciences Group
Hercules, Calif.
MOB VICTIM SPEAKS!
"Facing the Mob was the first time I have heard the term mobbing, though I've been suffering from it for several years now. I'm a software QA analyst, and have had to change jobs once a year for the last three years because at each workplace, the VP/CTO/Lead Developer was a bully who didn't want QA around. As you may imagine, QA is frequently the harbinger of bad news and often blamed for "holding up releases.
I think I was frequently targeted because I led the QA team. I wouldn't sign off on releases when I knew we hadn't tested them. Major coding changes were made until the very hour before a CD was burned for release. Once, I was even asked to "quick, make a document that says we tested this and sign it so the customer thinks we tested this, even though you didn't. I refused—and was written up for it. I made a formal complaint to HR in return. I'm pretty certain someone created a false document and signed my name on it anyway.
Each time these events happened, I complained to HR, the CEO, anyone who'd listen. I left two companies in a row because of this behavior. I finally landed at my present company, only to find that as "the new girl, I was targeted. (I later learned that this team has gone through many QA people in quick succession.) Information was withheld from me. I was blamed for not catching bugs for undocumented business rules. I was publicly humiliated any time I spoke in a meeting. I was given the silent treatment—people in the mob would refuse to respond to even a simple greeting. I came home every night in tears and was close to a mental breakdown.
Finally, another woman who was targeted for mobbing by the same group quit. This shook management, who asked if I knew why she quit. To their evident shock, I held nothing back. They said, "Everyone else manages to work fine with this group; why can't you guys? I explained and gave evidence I had documented. They suggested mediation. I refused and cited reasons why this wasn't my problem. This impasse finally resolved when a mob member bullied me in front of the vice president himself. The main bully was written up, and the rest reprimanded. One person was moved to another team. For two months, I've had no mobbing problems, and though I hope this ugly episode is over, I continue to cover my back and document furiously.
Name withheld
QA Analyst
Scottsdale, Ariz.
MERGING THE MOB
I just read Alexandra Weber Morales's editorial in the October 2004 issue, and wanted to share an ancient story about a series of events that happened to me about 14 years ago. I worked in an organization that was losing its market share. As the operation continued to shrink, it finally evolved into a single unit, and the tight-knit management department personnel came from only one of the previous groups. If you hadn't originated in that group, you were definitely an outsider.
Prior to this reorganization, I had always received good reviews and could work with anyone in the company. After being placed in one manager's group, I needed information from another manager to prepare bid estimates, but he kept putting me off. After this problem dragged on for a number of months and I complained repeatedly and fruitlessly to my manager, I received the only negative review of my career.
My point is simply that a rogue element of the organization controlled the performance of others and when challenged, banded together for self-defense. This experience gave me a new understanding of the old saying, "It's not what you know, but who you know. I enjoy Ms. Weber Morales's articles very much; she possesses the courage to touch on subjects that most people won't acknowledge.
William E. Tucker
Independent Computer Consultant
Irving, Tex.
SABOTAGING INNOVATION
In a workplace mobbing, blaming the victim for not having social skills is often part of the perpetrator's rationalization. The "gifted and talented adult may indeed have social skills that happen to vary from the norm. And it takes far more than average social insight to recognize the intricacies of mobbing, when the perpetrator and his allies or dupes often take pains to hide their actions from their target. The full reality of what has occurred may not be understood by the target for weeks, months and even years later, since it may take a great deal of time to assemble the scattered and hidden pieces of the truth.
As Ms. Weber Morales noted, this kind of tactic stifles and sabotages innovation, and, I would add, collaborative achievement in the workplace. Managers and human resources personnel need to be aware of and deal with this constructively in the U.S., as well.
Dale Hawthorne
Independent Software Consultant
Sapphire Technologies
Cleveland, Ohio
CREATIVE DATA ENTRY
In the early 1970s, I was hired to process data for a report to Congress describing how American taxpayers' money was being used for educational programs. A large group of us met in a single room, where we literally filled in blank data fields in the punch-card forms sent by school districts throughout the United States. These CPIRs (Consolidated Program Information Reports) consisted of three sections: Students, Teachers and Money. Our only caveat was "Don't mess with the money section. Our task was to fill in the blanks with basically any numbers we wanted.
The first day, a Vietnam veteran "processor told me, "Filling out CPIRs is like killing communists—the first one is hard, but it gets easier as time goes on. That remark, plus the fact that I had overheard two company execs state that it was necessary for the company to get the contract next year, caused me to write a letter to my congressman, who expressed little interest and recommended that I contact the Washington D.C. representative. The Department of Education thanked me for my services and let me know how pleased they were that I was so highly qualified for working on the "project. (I happen to have a master's degree in mathematics, but any idiot off the street could have done the job.) After less than two weeks, I quit.
Ron Brown
Upper Black Eddy, Pa.
TOO MANY LAPTOPS?
I'm a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. My boss is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. She works for an Air Force Colonel, and we all work for a retired Navy 2-star. A few months ago my boss told me she had already made arrangements to purchase 26 laptops for our organization. She told me she had everything in place except for the justification paperwork, and told me to prepare it. I had just ceased being our unit's IT Manager. I told her I wouldn't because I had already looked into the situation and could justify only 12 laptops.
She ordered me to prepare the justification for 26—the number was not negotiable. I refused because she was asking me to do something wasteful and thus, unethical. She told me she already had approval, thus I wasn't to argue, just do it. I continued to refuse. I contacted the Agency's Inspector General, who became concerned about two things: one, the potential waste of buying 26 laptops when 12 would do, and two, an employee ordering people to do something unethical.
The case hasn't been fully resolved, but we're now buying 16 laptops. We received legitimate justification for four more.
Thomas D. Neff, Lt. Col.,
U.S. Air Force
Warrenton, Va.
MORE MOBBING
I read "Facing the Mob with great interest. After 11 years of employment at which I've received one satisfactory rating and 10 "exceeds expectations reviews, I now find myself looking for employment elsewhere. I was recently called into my director's office to be told that a program manager in my department was deliberately pushing me out of all software development within my department. I was also told that the quality of my work was "below average and that I was "not productive enough. The example I was given? Two years ago on project X, the quality of my work was poor and I wasn't "productive enough—none of which was said to me at the time. I showed the director my performance evaluations, including the one from two years prior, in which that same program manager on that same project stated that my work was good, well maintainable and so on, and one on which I received a rating of "exceeds expectations. I also pointed out other evaluations that specifically stated that my work was of a high quality and that I completed it on time and within budget. My director stated that he didn't understand it because I had always done excellent work for him, but that he had to support the program manager and that given enough time and effort, I might become a "valued and trusted member of the department again.
I've always excelled at what I do, am extremely loyal, have high integrity and am what people have referred to as "vocal—in other words, I speak my mind and stand up for myself and others. By the way, I'm a female with two small children (ages 4 and 8). This experience has caused me to lie low, and my self-esteem has taken quite a beating. Even now, I still don't know what I supposedly did wrong, and I probably never will.
Name and location withheld
TESTING QUIBBLES
Regarding "Prevention's the Cure by Adam Kolawa (Test Center, Aug. 2004): The author includes a piece of inefficient Java code (class InefficientMakeMessage) and suggests using the String buffer class as a standard for this case as opposed to the String class. I agree that the code is inefficient, but why not use the concat method rather than switching classes, as in: message .concat(words[i])?
Will Hitchcock
Principal Design Engineer
Delphi Technology
Boston, Mass.
Adam Kolawa responds:
string.concat(word) does the same thing as +=: It doesn't concatenate work to the original string, but instead it allocates a new object and puts the concatenated value on it.
Actually, the Java compiler just converts string += word into string.concat (word). So basically, string.concat will still create a lot of memory for the garbage collector to clean—and it's inefficient.
AMUSING BUT INNOCUOUS
Hooked by your October 2004 cover ("Election Night Enigma—and other Horror Stories), I was expecting to find a cutting-edge analysis of the real impending horror-story: buggy, unsecured touch-panel electronic voting machines—without paper-trail backup. Instead, I find an amusing but innocuous tale about reporting election results. Please unleash your journalistic powers, skepticism and IT skills on the Diebold voting machine controversy—which could turn out to be the IT story of the year.
Steve Rawlins
Senior Developer
Minneapolis, Minn.
The Editor responds:
Warren Keuffel discussed just such concerns in his May 2004 Interface column, "Vote Early, Vote Often—but we're working on some other angles for a future article. While we knew the cover image might imply a voting machine controversy, the story of how election results were reported was a useful reminder that ballot casting and counting is but one step in the complex dance of democracy—one that we'll all be watching in November.
20TH ANNIVERSARY KUDOS
Congratulations to the staff of Software Development on 20 years of great work. I always enjoy Alexandra Weber Morales's editorials that start off my reading of each issue. The magazine quality is excellent and it's always a good read. Between that and the excellent technical conferences CMP puts together (I've also attended the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston the past four years), it was an easy decision to join the NOP World/CMP Media Developer's Panel when I was extended an invitation a couple of months ago.
Thanks for a great publication that I'm pleased to read every month. Here's to at least another 20 years for the magazine.
Philip T. Kasiecki
Consulting Engineer
Dot4 Inc.
Westford, Mass.
TECHNOLOGY MIRRORS MORALITY
I heartily applaud Warren Keuffel's statements regarding software trustworthiness ("In Software We Trust?, Interface, Oct. 2004).
Moral trustworthiness is built upon the attributes of truthfulness, reliability, honesty and the like. Program trustworthiness, like its moral counterpart, is based on attributes that have been building for the past several decades, including dependable hardware, reliable operating systems, languages that permit validation (at present by visual inspection), and programmer/designer integrity. Program trustworthiness will fail if any one of these components is missing or incomplete.
Leon Stevens
Lincoln University
Jefferson City, Mo.
THE COST OF ACCOUNTABILITY
Regarding "In Software We Trust?: There's no doubt that end users of software would love to hold software producers responsible for flaws in a product. Somewhere out there's a woman who will spill a hot PowerPoint document on her desktop and sue for millions (no offense to the actual plaintiff Liebeck, who did indeed deserve damages she received from McDonald's). In fact, what we really want is quality software. But let's consider the parallels to other industries. How much good has so much legal liability done? Now, our coffee cups have big warning labels telling us that the coffee inside is hot. So soon, I'll have to click through a warning splash screen each time I launch an application? Even if we tried to define some kind of legal liability, what would it say? The behavior of software is too complex to be able to invent any easy definition of what it should do. How would we define the proper behavior of Microsoft Word?
Also, not everyone needs the same level of quality, even for a given product. I may be willing to accept a greater risk of faults and flaws than a financial trading firm would. In fact, I practice this with the hardware I buy—I tend to purchase the cheapest hardware possible that has a halfway respectable name. The financial trading firm buys Dell or IBM hardware, including premium, on-site, same-day service. The financial firm pays much more for its hardware than I do, even when we have the same basic processor speed, memory and other features.
I don't think it's reasonable to hold software vendors "accountable in any broad sense. It would be too difficult to define what we would hold them accountable for.
Jens B. Jorgensen
Talln Inc.
Chicago, Ill.
Warren Keuffel responds:
You raise important points. I think that Larry Bernstein's campaign is designed to get us talking about such issues.
OUTSOURCING IN EUROPE
I seldom read an issue of SD without finding a mention of outsourcing. It really seems to be a burning problem in the U.S. and Canada.
In Old Europe, the issue is definitely less acute, at least for the continental area. It isn't that outsourcing isn't tempting: Each month brings its ration of delocalization, most of the time to Eastern European newcomers, where labor is still cheap and quality standards are comparable to Europe's. But, currently, only manufacturing is threatened; for now, IT is still safe.
I might be wrong, but I don't foresee the same outsourcing wave to occur in IT. Some big companies and major consulting firms have outsourced some activities, but with some visible reluctance. Except the fact that Europe traditionally lags behind North America, I think the reasons for this might include several factors.
Language barrier: Europe has no single language, making it harder for offshore companies to deal with local people.
Lack of proxies: Many European countries don't have a consistent or proactive immigration policy (like the H1-B visa), making it harder for offshore companies to have local networks of expatriates.
Market specifics: Some countries have a strong tradition of bank secrecy and won't let pieces of code go away.
Personal data protection: Europe is adamant about the right to have its personal data protected; very few countries outside the EU are fully trusted (for example, only Canada in North America).
It's fortunate for Europe that the U.S. response to outsourcing is agility. By increasing the quality and productivity level of the local workforce, by making IT teams closer to the end users, the agile approach makes it possible to keep jobs at home. I reckon the European reply to massive outsourcing would have been people in the street clamoring for trade barriers.
Because of its late entry in the outsourcing race, Europe is in the position to skip it and directly jump into agility. This is why I believe that preaching agility anywhere, anytime and in every flavor (XP, MDA ...) is a necessity for us European IT professionals. This time, we have a chance to be only a few years behind the U.S.!
David Dossot
Cofounder, V.P. Technology
Agile Partner
Luxembourg
