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An IT Fundamentalist Speaks: The Middle-Management Time-Elapse Memory-Erase System

Buy this book at Amazon.com!It has been years—almost 10 years—since I wrote “Bryan Wilhite: An IT Fundamentalist Speaks” and this Blog has served (occasionally) as what’s been happening in the mean time. So one Babylon thing that has been happening to me for years is something I finally have a name for: “The Middle-Management Time-Elapse Memory-Erase System”—here is how it works:

Middle management authority figure asks you to perform a task. You perform the task and complete the task—and you report completion in a time tracking system (often just email). A significant amount of time elapses. The middle management authority figure asks you (sometimes very dramatically), “Did you complete the task?”

Now, let’s sprinkle the previous paragraph with some spicy racism. The middle management authority figure (regardless of their American skin color) approaches you already with the very, very deeply inserted assumption that you are at fault in this situation. So depending on the level of whiteness of this figurine (regardless of their American skin color) you may even experience what essentially amounts to a police action. This means that the manager sees their role as one similar to a police officer and your role is very similar to a criminal. The underlying context here is that, since the very first day the middle manager met you, he (and it usually it a he) deputized himself and is continually looking forward to catching you in “the act.” In the extreme case, you can find yourself in a Troy Anthony Davis situation.

Ben Kinsley in SCHINDLER'S LISTSo not only must you, the worker, overcome the manager’s racist assumptions, the worker is also faced with the task of “managing upwards.” In the IT shop, this is quite a serious problem because you cannot “play dumb” while being employed in a profession that requires a significant amount of intelligence. There are many professional Negroes out there who are salivating at this juicy situation because these folks are masters of intelligent obsequiousness—kind of like that Itzhak Stern character, played by Ben Kingsley in Schindler’s List. For me, as you might notice from this Blog, my personality is not suited for general-purpose pleasure giving. Some people learned from childhood to smile when they really want to cry. My parents weren’t abusive like that so I probably won’t die from brain cancer but will very likely “make” less money.

For me, my rule is very primal: you either can help me to be a better IT developer or you cannot. When you can help me get my technical job done, I don’t care what kind of asshole you are as long as I have access to you I will get the information from you. But when it is clear to me that you are professionally useless in my workplace, I ‘fire’ you—I don’t care whether you invented the microchip using baling wire and punch cards, you are (abstractly) dead to me. I have been a student for decades so for one to assume that I am unable to identify a teacher—and even a child can teach me—is yet another insult to my intelligence and my integrity as a human being. So when this middle manager approaches me with “Did you complete the task?,” it is extremely difficult to conceal my disappointment. This middle-management behavior implies several things (outside of racial politics):

  • The manager is overloaded with overseeing tasks. Managers often try to impress me with how much email they have in their inbox. This is not impressive—it is an indicator of disorganization, inefficiency and overconsumption.
  • The manager has no ‘technical focus’—no personal stake in the work I am doing. To allow the significant amount of time to elapse without consulting metrics means that the work I’m doing is unimportant—until it suddenly becomes important.
  • This (often dramatic) sense of ‘sudden’ importance comes to the middle manager from a “higher power”—and all the middle manager does is pass the buck. John Engel, CEO, with the two `bodyguards`Now let’s sprinkle some more racism on the spot where the middle manager clearly demonstrates to me that my work is unimportant. In my experience, my work can predate the work history of the middle manager. When they are later put in charge of my preexisting project, ‘something’ permits them to assume that whatever I am doing is unimportant—like Al Sharpton got me my job or something—so I cannot possibly be working on something actually needed. When the “right people” get the message across to the middle manger that my shit is valuable, oftentimes valuable time has elapsed—time paid for by the white-supremacists superiors. Ironic, eh?

Any business-101 fool can see that this kind of shit can only happen in large organizations. In fact, the very existence of middle managers depends on large companies. So one might ask me the question, “Hey, dude, why not just work for a small company?” Well, my dad does not own a hardware store in Connecticut—so he can’t loan me 30,000 to get started. Secondly, my non-Ivy league school connections do not place me in casual contact with several seriously middle class people who could be my first customers. Thirdly, the ultimate destination of most small outfits is a large organization—unless you like to hang out with the ex-Israeli army charm of a sound chap like Joel Spolsky. Maybe you would like to do an urban video site for Ice Cube? How about setting up a few web sites for a young presidential candidate, Barack Obama, he seems like a breath of fresh air—right?

Buy this book at Amazon.com!So here is something that is literally maddening for too many of my poor professional brothers and sisters: the most efficient (and brutal) solution to this middle manager problem is to avoid hiring competent Black people. We need to think about this cruelty from the white-assholes-in-charge position: hiring an extremely competent Black person to place in the midst of coworkers who often have demonstrated their racism towards Blacks is disruptive. It is better to not hire this “disruptive element”—even when the “element” is very, very qualified. The same thing can happen to a woman because of her physical appearance.

In my experience with head hunters (who often form personal relationships with hiring managers—which allows for some personal conversation), I was refused a very high-paying job because the decision-maker asserted that I would be “bored” in his workplace. This is an insult to my character—the egocentric assertions of this male trying to operate with false knowledge of what makes me “bored”—and that I actually take the concept of “boredom” seriously. What this really means to me is that he saw my qualifications and he knew that I would be “disruptive” simply by existing. Many of the companies that have barred me (and others that I would never work for unless my children start to starve, like Countrywide—now owned by the crappy Bank of America) are now being bailed out by billions of tax-payer dollars. This situation is damn near biblical, mufukka… The Lord can exceed expectations…

It is an egocentric error for the poor Black person to assume that racism only hurts them—and other Black people. Don’t fall for that false, left-brain-dominant compartmentalization: the same mechanisms operating the controls of racist actions and triggers of racist emotions are used throughout the perpetrator’s entire life (it is also important to know that the perpetrator is often unaware of what they are doing and why they feel what they feel). Eventually this system of deliberate mis-measurement will come home to roost. This law was laid in the foundations of the Earth—and those that break this law often pass the debt down to their children through lies and other multi-billion-dollar blockbuster fairytales.

Some relevant links: