I have noticed a disturbing pattern on the project that I work on. It seems that if you bring up an issue, you get assigned the task to resolve it. This is problematic. There are a number of things wrong in the project. You reward for bringing them to light is extra work. This might be fine if you were sitting around twiddling your thumbs. But most people are very busy on our project. So the tendency is to just keep quiet about problems. That way you will not get tasked with extra chores at work.Yes I know that when you come forward with a problem, you should also have thought about a solution to pitch to management. However that does not mean that you need to go implement that solution too. That is crazy. I am not sure why this is the case. We might be suffering from poor team leadership or resource allocation. Whatever the cause, something should be done about it. However it is a vicious cycle. I would bring this up. But I worry that I will be tasked with investigating and implementing a solution to the problem. I am already behind on my major tasks. And I do not want to be part of any action that requires me to start working weekends.
The only time I step up and volunteer that we have problems is if I know the work will come my way anyway. And I also speak up when I see that the problem is going to directly impact my ability to do my job. Other than that, I just keep quiet. Now that I think about it, the people who have kept quiet all along are the ones who are not heavily tasked. It must be nice. I like earning a good day’s pay. I also do not mind working hard. However I have been burned in the past where I used up a lot of my life at work because everything was falling apart. So I guess I am quite paranoid about project mismanagement.
These types of issues at work remind me of a time when a huge project was promised in a short amount of time. The result was a death march. I tried to make some sense about the outrageous demands on my time. At first I would try to get management to identify some concrete milestones that I needed to get done by a certain date. The only response I got was that I needed to work long and hard. If I got lucky or finished a task, I had to stick around because they had a whole bunch of other tasks they could assign me ad infinitum. Now I am sensing a déjà vu with the number of problems that are surfacing, along with the way that problem resolution is dealt with.
