IT Industry Blues - Part 1.2: Team Player - It Starts

Team Player. That’s the name of my second novel – originally published in Australia and to be republished in 2006 by Double Dragon. It’s about the world’s biggest software company, ErectSoft Inc, and the goofs who work there.

Team Player is also the name of the employee who’s least likely ever to be seen as the first person to leave the office at the end of the day even if it means staying hours late asking him or herself who the hell has anything important enough to do around here to stay this late, for crise sake?

I was a Team Player once. Yes I, Biff Mitchell, used to work evenings, weekends, and weekend evenings for days, weeks, months on end whether it was really important to get the job done that fast or not. It was like an addiction. One moment I was a normal fun-loving individual with a life – the next, I was selling my soul to some inhuman Gantt chart that existed only in my imagination.

I was a Team Player for almost a year before the employer introduced the first Gantt chart – and not one of those electronic drawings from the wildest imagination of the world’s most prolific fantasy writer was nearly as unforgiving as the imaginary one in my own head during that year.

You see, I was driven by a fanatical belief in the value of my work and the indelible nobility of viewing that work in the context of a contribution to a Team. You know, finish those sixty screen builds before tomorrow morning and it’s like you just hit a homer with the bases loaded. And knowing damn well that you wouldn’t have hit the homer if the bases weren’t loaded. After all, who needs a grandstander taking up the light all by himself? We need someone who “blends.”

And blended I did. Right into the furniture and floors. I swear, by some sick magic, I was there more than they were.

Oops, was I just grandstanding?

I worked almost every evening and weekend. I stayed late Friday nights. Nobody stays late on a Friday night. There are natural laws deemed necessary for sanity by the Earth Goddess. She dispenses them in the hopes that people will think for themselves as opposed to submitting blindly to mob rule.

Which is exactly what being a Team Player is. It’s a mob. Nobody’s controlling it. Nobody’s really in charge of it. It exists only in the minds of its components. Its rules are illusory. It eats the stragglers. It’s easily influenced by the project manager. The quality manager. The marketing manager. The media manager. The office manager. The …

Isn’t it strange how mindless conformity seems to breed new deities?

Team Players have a deep-rooted sense of everybody else’s time being more important than their own, unless of course they’re standing around outside in the cold smoking a cigarette and muttering about not having any spare time to do anything right before marching back in to work another two hours of overtime when they could just as easily have done the work the next day, but then, they figure that Manager X is probably in a really big bind over the, you know, that got messed up the other day and yeah we tried to warn him but he wouldn’t listen and where the hell is he tonight? But yeah, he’s going to ask me to do it and if I don’t, well, it’s just going to make the whole Team look bad.

I mean, Manager X should listen and even Manager X knows it at some subconscious level, but why should he listen? Why would he think for a moment that he might be accountable for his bad decisions when he has a Team of Team Players who will lay down their weekends to make his world right so that he can get that productivity bonus and not have to give up a single night of TV with his family.

Team Players do a lousy job of educating the people around them.

Prochain episode: Team Player – The Pain

And always remember: People don't exist to fulfill the needs of work; work exists to fulfill the needs of people.