I can buy the part about putting up fences between business people at the tech team. Been there, done that, modernized project management. But the "thank you"s, bonuses and all that? Complete fantasy. :)
When I first encountered the Phoenix Project, I was expecting it to be some kind of satire. It wasn't, it was played straight all the way through and ends with "a win".
It blows my mind that someone could write a novel about work and NOT have it be a satire or dark comedy. This book is used in project management courses, by the way.
The manager maybe, but you don't change the culture of the company like that. A low level manager has very little influence on that, they'd be replaced the moment other VPs started complaining.
Depends on the on the exact political arrangements. I’ve seen a “low” level manager get the ear of a senior leader and get protection/empowerment that ended them to do something on par with this. It sounds like the author got the appropriate buy in, and I suspect that not all ad hoc work got prioritized in a FILO manner.
It sounded implausible to me. Admittedly I don’t work for a large corporation but this sounded like a socially challenged persons dream of how they’d convince large groups of opposing people to their side. Hostile interactions with shelter from an all powerful HR and the vague threat of a lawsuit.
I've explicitly asked for strong barriers from external leads and developers from my manager before and gotten them. My current boss aggressively puts barriers in place to keep us from being bothered or distracted.
Why? I do this stuff all the time as a manager. It really goes exactly that way. Notice that the reddit commenter started with getting buy-in from the higher-up in their org. He didn't unilaterally start changing process.
This is honestly basic management technique. It is called the "Auntie/Uncle" problem.
I’m having a bit of trouble what “Auntie/Uncle problem” is in reference to. My Google search are just a bit too generic to narrow in. Any chance you know of an article on the subject I can read through?
I could see it happening where I work (Large Multinational in the Energy Industry). HR are removed enough that they would back this up, yet have the authority. Teams often report by function, therefore there isn't a local manager worried about the missed deadline. Combined with the companies image as attempting to be a leader in social responsibility (at least as much as an Oil and Gas company can). I can see it happen however I don't think I could see it in any of the smaller companies I have worked for as the results of missing deadline were frequently too significant.
That being said my current employer is exactly like the one mentioned by OP here. You basically need to build credibility internally to deliver.
It's pretty hard to imagine HR intervening in business operations to protect a single department's work-life balance - couldn't really track it from there.
Reddit is 90% LARPing when it comes to situations like this - it's obvious once you see it, and once you see it you can't unsee it ever again. It's like getting vaccinated against a sickness.
odd that most in this thread think this story is fiction, some even suggest it might be a marketing ploy to peddle a book. Is really the whole world like this or is there a difference depending on jurisdiction (e.g. comments reflect values of US?).
While I can't prove a negative, this story is highly plausible in Europe where legal/HR will be on your ass and even fire the CEO if it turns out they had knowledge.
In 2020 I was in a similar situation with an IoT "startup" (70 people) in Austria where some of the original founding team worked their employees in a brutal manner (made fun of the engineering providers that invented the product in a "low-cost" neighboring country, and being total f-heads all around).
My superior even made fun of one intern for "stuttering" in front of the whole team, scolding him for "sloppy thinking" and being "too slow in his head" (fact was he wasn't used to speaking English, was a bit insecure because he was still very young). People regularly cried.
That was just the internal stuff. In my first weekend in this firm I was given new tasks on Friday 16:00 to finish until Monday 08:00 (tasks so complex that it would normally take a whole week to finish and required multiple rounds of input). I had no free weekend in my first month and 12/hrs per day was the norm. In my first client meeting 2 days into the job I learned that my company lost all their data 3 months before ... genuinely curious I started probing the client to get a better picture of how we were perceived. The client talked himself into such a rage that he ended up screaming at me (and a day later apologizing for doing so).
2 weeks after I joined, I wrote a long letter to HR with a list of all the communication that happened, e.g. who said what to me when, and even smtp headers of communication received in an appendix. After the CEO asked me to lie on a revenue forecast that served as input to the business plan (and where I was told "to make up numbers" !!) I looped in the Holding company into my ongoing conversation with HR (the holding was where my employer got all their funding and who would be the audience for that pitch in the presentation/Excel I was asked to make).
It was the first time that I ended up (literally) screaming with my own superior in a meeting for abusing his own team, and spelling out immediately why his behavior was abuse. 2/3 of my team left that very month since they were fed up and I like to think it was me that spelled out for everyone what they already knew but hadn't ever thought to verbalize themselves.
I also handed in my resignation a week afterwards since it looked like some people would be able to get away with it. The Holding Company brought in an external consulting / auditing team and fired the CEO and 2 others. Alas ... not for mistreating or overworking employees but for lying on the business plan. This October (2 quarters later) the same company filed for bankruptcy.
I don't know if I would be able to bring down an equally rotten place in a different jurisdiction. YMMV sadly and I am sure many people try in other places but all they ever achieve is that those responsible get a "stern warning". But I totally believe the linked article to be plausible
Reddit in particular is infected by this kind of toxic thinking. One on the one had, I think individuals hate being fooled, and so there’s a rush to decry any remarkable or interesting anecdotes as “bullshit”. In this case in particular, I suspect the disbelievers are stuck in soul-sucking jobs they hate, and one way they cope with that is by truly believing that everyone else in the world is in a similar situation.
Its such a strange, depressing way to approach content imo. Did the story happen? Maybe, maybe not, we can’t know for sure. Do I want to believe it happened? Yes. Are there valuable aspects in the story that I can learn from and potentially use in future? Yes, absolutely. Is there any harm in me choosing to believe his anecdote is real and it’s actually made up? No, I don’t think so.
Also, don’t get me wrong — there is plenty of fake content, or implausible content, that is worthy of skepticism because it has a nefarious agenda, fosters misinformation, etc. But sometimes people just need to chill out.
I'm not sure if I believe this, and I certainly don't think it has much to do with the existence of r/thathappened (which does indeed seem much more rooted in people's fear of having been a sucker). But it's interesting to think that the basic intuition of "true stories are more common than fake ones" might be misleading with respect to Reddit in particular, because of the specifics of how Reddit works.
(The point about it being harmless is unpersuasive to me; I want to believe that a given story is true if and only if it is actually true.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s...
for everyone else having a hard time figuring out how to find the actual comment.
Really worth a read and absolutely puts OPs story into perspective.