It’s been a good long time since I added any thoughts to this blog. I have a couple good excuses. I quit my job. After years of trying to change the organization from within, I gave up. The signs were all over all my previous posts, and I’d wager that most readers figured it out before I did. I’m sure more spite will spittle into subsequent posts now and again. Anyway, I spent what was left of my genius trying to find a job.
If you read the posts then you know that I live in a moderately rural part of the country and jobs that fit my skills are rarer than Kobe Bryant assists. Eventually I hooked on with a much smaller org. In addition to responsibilities in maintenance and engineering, I became the de facto purchasing manager, warehouse manager, relief supervisor, relief plant manager, part-time receiving clerk, etc etc. It’s as much fun as I’ve ever had working.
However, people are still people, and people make orgs. This org is much more functional than the last one, but there are still lessons to learn and occasions to ponder.
More on the new job… It is a start-up company, which comes with a whole new set of issues and pressures. Funding is a big worry. I’d never heard the phrase “funding runway” until a couple months into it. FYI, the funding runway is the length of time we can function before we run out of money. Most of the key technology is serial number 1. Sure, there are pumps and motors and mixers that one would see in any process plant, but the combinations thereof take some getting-used-to. As I wrote in a post some months back, if you want to be creative, hire young engineers. We have many. And as I wrote in that post, young engineers often create interesting solutions to regular old problems, when sometimes experience would lead one into more elegant reactions.
The experience level of the operators and techs is lower than I’ve seen at prior orgs. The techs are folks who would fix their dad’s tractor back on the farm, where baling wire and duct tape are perfectly fine, and getting a bigger hammer can get decent short-term results. The operators are the ones who weren’t smart enough to be able to fix dad’s tractor. (Okay, I’ll admit that was a bit of a low blow. My anti-operator bias is still breathing.)
More interesting still, since it’s a start-up, is that there is no HR in the org. Regular employees like me officially work for a web company out of state. I suppose that’s the wave of the future. Thus far I’ve the ratio of positive/negative communications with HR is 2 with the new company; almost negative numbers with the old org (especially after I left – holy cow – if I thought they were dysfunctional before I was reminded how low zero was).
This lack of HR directly effects the worst thing about this job (and truth be told it aint that bad). The techs and operators don’t work for our company. They work for the plant next door. Officially, we own the equipment and “advise” them on how to run it. Or, in my case, I “make recommendations” on how to install and maintain the equipment. The maintenance manager next door is the guy in charge, except he spends much more time and energy on his teenager’s hockeycareer than our plant. There’s the void I stepped into, and it’s just fine with me.
Our neighbors hired a supervisor who acts like one of us, but the leash goes next door and their tugs get more of her attention than our Milkbones. We can be in the middle of a trial (not a rare occurrence, as you might imagine), when she’ll get called to a meeting and poof! she’s magically transported to the Land of Nodding Off.
But more on that some other time. For now…middle management blues is dead. Long live middle management, um, blues???
Comments
Post a Comment